Customer Reviews

Bulletproof Web Design: Improving flexibility and protecting against worst-case scenarios with XHTML and CSS

5 star:		(85)
4 star:		(28)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you are just coming over the the standards-compliant light, this book is the best for showing real, working techniques. Great examples that work. A cookbook. Cederholm won my heart and my mind with "Web Standards Solutions" and this book builds on that theme. The man is a good writer, easy to understand, and he makes compelling and lucid points.

Cederholm's presentation is great: he states a problem or goal, then examines several different ways of solving it. The examinations are just a paragraph or two long -- short and to the point. He points out the strengths and weaknesses of the various solutions, then concludes with a "best practices" solution. Finally, he builds on and refines the best practices solution to deliver a finished piece. When there is no clear-cut best way, he lays the cards on the table and let's you decide what is best for your specific application. He talks about the compromises between pixel-perfect layouts and fluid layouts and how each effects design and useability issues.

It is not stand-alone because a good reference is still useful to have by your side.

I'm a Web designer for one of the big three office supply chains in the US. This book is never more than an arm's reach away from my workstation, and I consult it almost daily. Unlike other XHTML/CSS books that examine what's theoretically possible, Cederholm's book focuses on foolproof solutions to common Web design issues. It is engagingly written and beautifully lain out. With this book and a basic knowledge of CSS, you'll be creating pages that not only look great, but make the Web a better place. This is the new Web bible. Buy it, read it, live it.

Bulletproof Web Design does an incredible job of teaching, step-by-step, how to make your website `Bulletproof.' The author introduced the book by defining what it means to have a bulletproof website. He used the example of a police officer wearing a bulletproof vest. No, it is not 100% protection against a bullet - but it decreases the chances and is extra protection. When applied to a website, this means that your website can handle the `bullets' being thrown at it. These are things like text resizing, use of assistive devices, no CSS, no images, and a few other examples.

The thing I liked most about this book is that it wasn't preaching web standards - It was simply walking you through each chapter - with each chapter building on the last - and showing you techniques that WORK. The book itself does an incredible job of keeping your attention through the use of images, highlighting, and full code listing. For those who can't quite grasp CSS (especially positioning and the like), this book is extremely helpful through its thorough explanations and visuals. Screenshots are provided each step of the way to let you see your progress.

Each chapter introduces you to new ways of handling things like text display, link display, navigation, list elements, layouts, floating, positioning, and a few others. Each chapter first take an example of a website (or aspect of a website) that is NOT bulletproof, then re-constructs that example with semantic XHTML and CSS to show you the results. The last chapter of the book brings it all together and shows you how it could be used in a production environment, with each piece of the puzzle being put together. The author doesn't dwell on the array of hacks and filters - but simply lists the ones that he uses and how they get the job done (and why they are needed).

Using proper XHTML and CSS is sometimes misunderstood. This is where many will start with a bad case of classitis and divitis and start going crazy adding extra markup. The author does a great job of creating very lean, structured, semantic XHTML. This is the XHTML that is friendly to browsers and other devices alike, as well as rich in meaning. Using proper elements to get the job done is vitally important to the meaning of the website itself. He focuses on this aspect, and with each chapter discusses the importance of the structure and not adding unnecessary presentational markup to your pages. It is this separation of presentation and content that ultimately makes using proper CSS a wise choice.

Quite frankly, this is one of the best CSS books I have read - and would recommend it to both the beginner and advanced CSS developer. This review doesn't even do the book justice - mainly because you need to buy it and read it to really enjoy the context as a whole. There are many things I could explain in more detail, and there are many different things that I learned through reading this book (some of which were things that were needed immediately). This is a no-fluff CSS book that brings everything together nicely, and a must have for any web developers bookshelf!

I've read a lot of good about this book and a lot of good from Dan Cederholm so I had my hopes up when I got this book. I have to admit I was a bit let down.

Don't get me wrong, it does a fantastic job in exposing how easy it is to convert old and clumsy design to new, slick, CSS based design with very little effort.

It feels short though and, at times, repetative. The entire last chapter, while meant to be a recap of all the previous chapters, feels unnecessary as the entire book is only 260 pages. There's very little need for a recap when you read the entire book in a couple of hours.

It's not a great reference book either. While you can look up the chapter about indestructible boxes in order to check how Dan actually anchors all the corners, it's not laid out in a manner that encourages this (and I don't think that was the idea with the book to begin with either).

I did get a lot of inspiration and the section about floats was quite informative, though I would like some more information about what we're doing instead of just enough to solve the specific problem.

At times Dan hints to how to use certain tricks to achieve a certain result that's not part of the current design but most of the time the book points to various (mostly excellent) resources on the net where you need to continue your research on your own.

One thing the book does great is pointing out how important it is to have "logical" and intelligent markup before you start applying CSS and that CSS isn't the solution to every single design problem on the Internet.

I think the book is pricey considering that it's short and you will probably not use it as a reference guide once you get the hang of the ideas and tricks Dan teaches out.

If you on the other hand need to get a kickstart as far as designing with CSS goes then it's invaluable. I'm never going to use tables the same way as I used to, for instance.

This is an excellent book on CSS. The title is a little misleading, as it is really about creating bulletproof web designs using CSS. It does not address any of the myriad of other topics that would make a site bulletproof like security, XHTML, web servers, application servers, etc. etc.

If you don't know what CSS is yet, then this book is certainly not for you. If you are looking for a basic getting started book on HTML, with a little on CSS I would suggest the VERY excellent Elizabeth Castro book, now in its sixth edition entitled "HTML, XHTML and CSS, sixth Edition" a Quick Start quide, of course available on Amazon.

Dan Cederholm's book "Bulletproof Web Design's" is a good companion to other more basic books, once you know that you want to use CSS to format web sites, and have a clue how to use it.

The one problem I have with this book, is that it _only_ provides the CSS. There is absolutely no HTML anywhere, which makes looking at examples a litle tough. The graphic illustrations of the results look great, the examples are useful, well explained and in a logical order.

This is certainly one of several books to have around when creating a modern web site with HTML and CSS.

In fact, it can be a good companion for those who both hand-code sites, and use professional tools like Dreamweaver.

So, as a CSS book, I give it 5 stars, as a general bulletproof web design book, I give it 3 stars, because it really has very little content about the other relevant subjects.. But, I'll be fair and rate this as a CSS book, title notwithstanding, and give it 5 stars.

I've been doing HTML since the mid-90's and I like to admit it, but I did not really follow its evolution. I understood very little about XHTML and CSS and used those technologies badly.

This book is like a bootcamp, it learned me the new techniques in a straight to the point way, the way I like it.

I definately recommend it! Well worth the money and the time!

Simply put, I like Dan's approach. I have attempted all of the ideas he presents in this book and they've all rendered properly in IE6, Mozilla 1.03, and Opera 8.5. I haven't tried the examples in legacy browsers such as Netscape 4, which apprently bungles CSS to bits. He claims it works in those browsers... and I believe him.

His ideas allow users (site visitors) to resize their text without distorting page layout - bottom line. I've tested that as well. Remember the days of table based layout. If a user chose to increase his font size, tables would stretch and the integrity of the layout would be severly compromised. Not with Dan's approach. Your text stays contained within it's elements, because the elements adjust to the font size of the text they contain... pretty nifty.

More importantly, his layouts display properly in text based browsers because of proper use of semantic markup. Same goes for palm pilots, and other non-traditional methods of viewing web pages. In simple terms, his ideas meet the standards of the Web Accessibility Initiative.

Remember not being able to view javascript menus of yesteryear, because javascript was disabled... forget about it... no need to write javascript menus anymore, because CSS can handle all of those fun mouseover-type effects for you (if javascript is your bag, I would recommend Jeremy Keith's book - DOM Scripting).

OK, that's should probably do it.

I don't want to knock the book too much because I greatly respect the author and am an avid reader of his terrific website simplebits.com.

However, what none of the rave reviews here have told you is that this book is really for newbie designers. If you have been in the business for more than a year or two, this stuff should pretty much be second nature.

I have been working as a web designer for 6 years, and made the change over to table-less designs - seperating design from content - a couple of years ago. I am always looking for ways to do things better, and was hoping this book would give me tips to take me to the next level.

But rather, instead of taking me to the next level of web design as I had hoped, all I got was the same stuff I have been reading on ALA and other sites for months - or even years!

Yes, the book is beautifully designed and very well written. Yes, it is divided into short easy-to-follow chapters with step-by-step instructions. Yes, Dan Cederholm is excellent in presenting his thoughts on paper and comes up with some quite clever solutions to common problems we designers face every day.

The problem is that all of the information in this book has already been posted in articles around the web. So if you follow his blog, and/or blogs from other leading designers, you really don't need this book.

I bought it based on the overwealmingly positive reviews here at Amazon. However, after completing the book in less than 3 hours, I hadn't read one single idea or solution that I havn't already been using in my designs. (Granted, I learned many of the techniques I use today from wonderful and helpful sites such as Dan's simplebits.com, so it is only fair that he gets some of my money. I only wish I was aware of exactly what I was paying for.)

My advice is to save your money and go to mezzoblue.com, csszengarden.com, alistapart.com and simplebits.com where you will find all you need to know to be a great web designer.

Bulletproof Web Design tackles some of the common design problems on modern websites. Each chapter takes the approach of defining a problem, usually in the context of what was wrong with the old table-based, inaccessible approach, and showing how to implement it using CSS and XHTML. The book is very readable. The examples are concise and clear and with plenty of pictures.

Topics covered:
- techniques for defining boxes with rounded corners, that can be made expandable
- planing for accessibility by organizing the page logically and allowing the text to be resized without making the page look bad
- using floats to achieve grid-like appearance (instead of tables)
- handling vertical expansion
- fluid layouts

I also recommend these books on CSS:
Accessible XHTML and CSS Web Sites Problem Design Solution and CSS: The Missing Manual

First and foremost, I am not a web designer. I do have alot of experience in application development on all tiers (database, application, plus web). I was taught web design before CSS was a major factor in web application design (a while ago, I know). I have not updated my web skillsets in relation to CSS. So my layout consisted mainly of nested tables (when I figured out how to get that done, I was pretty excited about that). But after a while, I ended up with a lot of ugly code that was hard to maintain plus troubleshoot. This book is very simple, straight to the point, with excellent working examples. It teaches you what you need to know concerning layout, navigation, some of the core concepts that every site needs (using only CSS), which has reduced my overall presentation code tremendously, allowing me to focus on functionality rather than spending alot of time on presentational aspects. I cannot recommend this book enough!