Customer Reviews

Adapting to Web Standards: CSS and Ajax for Big Sites

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

I a big fan of books that simplifies technology and provides useful (not comedic) illustrations. I picked up this book and read it cover to cover within a few hours. It reads well and has few dull moments. Isn't that amazing for a Standards book?! Seriously, I'm astonished with how much funner tech books are these days. I almost view them as novels than 'work manuals.'

Obviously, if you're looking for a dry implementation book this is not the right choice for you. I would say this book is made for those who need a refresher, those who are curious, or the management type. I'm a developer myself, but I'm more of a 'convention over configuration' type. I rate this highly and compare it closely to the excellent "Bulletproof" series.

You would never guess that this book was written by so many different people just from reading it because the information contained in the book is well written, considstent, and logically ordered, something that many books with multiple authors lack.

The sub-title on the cover refers to big sites as the targetted audience for this book. I disagree with that sub-title as the content of the book is as appropriate for smaller web sites as it is for the larger ones.

All of the different aspects of a properly designed web site are covered, HTML, CSS, andJavaScript each have a separate chapter to cover all of the client side coding standards. While a single chapter covers all of the server side languages, much of the information presented is relevant regardless of which server side language you are using and where it does mentuion specific languages it is to discuss problems that those languages specifically have in generating standards compliant code.

Not being satisfied with telling you how to code to the standards, the book then concludes with two real life case studies of real web sites that underwent makeovers to bring their code in line with the standards. These case studies are particularly interesting because they cover when a larger site may need to consider breaking certain of the standards in order for their pages to handle the heavy load that their huge number of visitors represent. Conciously deciding to break standards and having a specific reason for doing so is a very different situation to inadvertantly breaking standards through failing to code properly in the first place and these case studies make it clear what that difference is.