Customer Reviews

CSS Web Design For Dummies

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

I generally turn to "Dummies" books when I have no knowledge of a subject, but need quick information. I like the books... Unlike most techies, I like the humor contained within. One thing about techno-dummie books is that they generally give you just enough information to get up and running... They're great starting points. However, you will not learn standarized methods, as proposed by the W3C, from this book. You'll learn about selectors, but things like the box model are not really explained as well as they should be.

THIS BOOK IS GEARED TOWARDS IE BROWSERS ONLY - as the author states several times throughout. In regards to marketing, MS owning 90% market share, it makes sense to teach from this angle. But to learn the full potential of the language I can't see the justification. Firefox, Opera, and Safari, already support alot of selctors from CSS Level 3, leaving the IE viewers a degraded or dimished view of pages created to standard. It's possible that IE may take advantage of these things in the future, hopefully, and you won't learn what CSS truly has to offer in the dummies books.

I would definitely recommend looking at WROX CSS books such as "Professional CSS..." and "Accessible XHTML and CSS Web Sites Problem Design Solution" after reading this book. Other good books would be Jeremy Keith's "DOM Scripting...", which is geared towards CSS guys, and Dan Cederhom's "Bulletproof Web Design..."

That being said, the Dummies book, in my opinion is the easiest starting point... just be prepared to do more reading.... lots more.

The whole point of CSS is to open up the web to a large number of users whether they use a Windows machine, a Mac, a phone, a mobile device, are blind etc. Furthermore, CSS is based around the w3.org STANDARDS which define how browsers are supposed to display information. It's well known amongst designers and developers that Internet Explorer has quite the worst correct support of these standards - in other words it tends to display pages incorrectly. Almost all top CSS designers will design on a browser that has good standards such as Firefox, and then iron out the broken renderings that IE produces at the end.

It's totally amazing to me that on author should be promoting CSS (ie standards based design) then suggest that because most people use IE, you should design to its broken renderings. This is a bad idea for many reasons
1. what happens if Microsoft update IE to support standards correctly. Your page will be broken
2. at least 20% of users don't use IE. If you are a business who turns 20% of your customers away they you won't last long. This number will only get bigger too.
3. The whole point of the web is that it is a system that is independent of any platform, and CSS is a culmination of this effort. By designing for IE's quirks, you are effectively moving back to the dark ages of 'view this page in NN at 800pixels wide on a screen of ...'.

Effectively this book is teaching fundamentals using broken tools. Hardly a way to learn a new powerful technique that is revolutionizing the web.

Like other readers, I found myself extremely put off by the author's unfathomable condescension towards platforms other than Windows XP, browsers other than Internet Explorer 6, and monitors either smaller or larger than the norm. Would that it stopped there. He also goes out of his way to insult standards bodies, programmers, and even animators who haven't switched to all-digital production.

Beyond the blatant callousness of his remarks, there is a serious weakness here for a book coming out under the otherwise excellent ...Dummies line: It's simply not good business, for two reasons:

1) Even if people who don't use standard and software and equipment are used to seeing Web pages that don't work properly, that doesn't mean that it doesn't alienate them. If I were the owner of a small business, I simply wouldn't want to hire a Web designer who is cheerfully willing to cut my sales by even as much as 5%. It's bad business.

In particular, a lot of people who use old software do so because they are overwhelmed by the relentless press to upgrade or simply can't afford it. Yes, IE6 is free--but XP isn't.

2) Standards are not static, nor is software. Within the next year or so, the dominant platform is likely to be Vista and the dominant browser IE7 (or later). The best way to guarantee that my Web pages will continue to work with future software and standards is to make sure that they're conformant now. Again, if I were looking from the perspective of a business owner, I wouldn't want to have to rehire my Web designer (or, more likely, a different one) in two or three or five or ten years because the non-standard CSS they wrote now stopped working, soley because they made the lazy assumption that the only browser one needs to support is IE6.

I'm really astonished that the editor at Wiley let this one out the door.

CSS is intended to be a standard way to separate layout issues from content. A well-designed web site using CSS will look the same on any standard-conforming browser.

Despite this, the author actually urges readers to design solely for Microsoft Internet Explorer (see pp. 19-20). For this reason, I urge people to avoid this book.

I just started reading this book and none of code so far is correct. I just found out that you need to put a semi colon after each declaration! That is a very important thing in CSS apparently and they don't even put it in the book? Then they misstype the code so it won't work? Very disappointed.

After reading the rest of these reviews (which I should have done first) I doubt I will finish the book.

As other reviewers have already pointed out, the author recommends ignoring non-IE browsers, which is patently ridiculous in 2005.
I was particularly amazed at how he mocks the W3C's validator for being to strict when it disqualifies his code. Satisfying the validator isn't difficult, and if you think it is you probably shouldn't write books on web design.
Dummies should look elsewhere.

I should have read the reviews here before purchasing my copy.

This author must be paid by M$, almost none of the examples in the book work in other browsers than M$IE.
Moreover he doesn't stop claiming readers should only make their websites for MSIE, and not bother for other browsers...

<SIGH>

I just wasted my money.

Book is very, very narrow and basic and what it covers and offers nothing that a web tutorial can give you in about a half hour's worth of reading. This book is pure trash, if you want to learn CSS and don't want to waste your life doing it, I highly suggest you look elsewhere.

It has some interesting examples, but it got into unnecessary explanation of the thousands of ways to address a tag, a bit annoying. Then I got to page 91, where the author tries to explain the difference between "relative" and "absolute" positioning of elements. Here I encountered one of my biggest pet peeves. I will let you read it yourself:
"Of course, as Albert Einstein pointed out, everything is relative except the
speed of light. So, when we speak of "absolute" positioning, it merely means
that we're being somewhat "less relative." What do I mean by this?
You actually cannot sit still, no matter how hard you try. When you think you're
sitting still, you're still moving at about a half million miles per hour as the solar
system spins around the galaxy. In fact, you're moving through space in a rapid
and complex corkscrew path. Even while you're quietly asleep, you're still flying
aboard the rotating earth, orbiting the sun, spinning around the galaxy. And the
galaxy itself is hurtling through the universe. So you're moving really fast in a
dozen different circles all the time. Luckily, so is your bed and everything else
in your room. They're all at rest, relative to you, but not relative to light."

What? Did he really..? I am staring away like Jim from The Office, into an imaginary camera right now.

This is, perhaps, the worst instructional web design text I have ever come across. I came across a copy for free but I still paid too much.

I am familiar with CSS but for the reader that this book is clearly aimed toward, this text would be a disaster for several reasons:

Explanations of basic concepts are unclear and sometimes appear to trail off in the middle of a concept. (See "Controlling Layout with Offsetting", for example.)

Extremely "un-sound" advice is given, such as using descriptive words for colors rather than hex codes (called a "bizarre RGB equivalant" Whaaa?").

The book is about CSS. About cascading style sheets, that is, standards compliant design, and yet at every turn the author is advising the reader to use proprietary code. One of the most central issues of web design is the awareness of the number of different browsers used and cross-platform issues, and yet at every turn the author seems to be portraying a web where everyone uses IE and where IE is some kind of gold standard of how a browser should behave (cough). This flies in the face of the entire basis of CSS.

I saved the best for last, the part where my eyes nearly fell out of my head, page 79, and I quote: "But my advice is to just assume that pretty much everyone who'll see your Web page uses IE. Why? Because most everyone *does* use IE.

Where can I go from that? I have never felt so compelled to write a review. For the experienced designer, the book is funny enough to laugh about over lunch. For the novice designer taking this as a source of reliable information, the book is an unmitigated disaster. Stay away.