Customer Reviews

Cascading Style Sheets: The Designer's Edge

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I grabbed this book at Barnes & Noble and sat in the cafe with a cup of coffee just to check it out. 2 hours later I felt like I had just learned an amazing amount of information.

When I got home I started reading the reviews of this book on Amazon and was dumbfounded by the criticism of this book.

This book is fantastic for the person who hates "computer talk" books. You know what I'm talking about... books that are written so dryly and by people who write so technically that you can barely understand anything you are reading.

This book is like a breath of fresh air. The fact that the author provides a history of SGML, HTML, XHTML, CSS and such is great because it gives you an underlying basis of knowledge, a foundation from which to grow.

Her style of writing is conversational, perhaps a bit repetitive but that helps drive home the concepts. I did not find it distracting at all. I like this style of writing because it helps me to learn better. The book takes a measured, logical approach to the subject. I put this book down realizing that I had LEARNED the fundamentals of CSS without any confusion whatsoever.

This book is not intended for people already familiar with CSS concepts. It is best for newbies to the subject. I've looked at a lot of CSS books and I would rate this as one of the best I've ever read. Even better than the knowledgable Eric Meyer books. I prefer this author's style of writing compard to Eric's. However, Eric's books are more comprehensive and are better suited for taking you to the next level.

The biggest negative with this book is that there are numerous typos and errors. an astute reader may pick them out quite easily but it is a very poor reflection on the publisher and that is why I can only rate this book a 4.

This book is very beautiful, printed on high quality paper, with high quality screen shots. But it is boring, by repeating the simplest things over and over. If you need to be guided by hand and can't remember what was written on the previous page, you need this book. If you have the slightest idea about CSS already you should put your money elsewhere.

This book could easily be 30% (or more!) smaller. Every sample is repeated, adding one new line to the styles or HTML at the time. Even dummy text is repeated: one half page dummy text is repeated four times! I didn't buy this book to read poetry (or whatever it is).

At the end of the book there's a display of the "gurus" web sites - but not a single line of CSS to show what they did to achieve this! The author doesn't even use her own web site as an example. She could have shown how she built it and why (assuming she knows...?)

I'm sure the author knows CSS inside out (much better than I do). But this book is not for designers nor for implementers. There are no useful, complete samples - a total of seven pages deal with "Experimenting with layout"!!!

Things that are not addressed in this book:
Using alternate style sheets
How to use :focus
The future of CSS - a heads up on CSS2 would have been nice.
How to use attribute selectors (the book says: "The level of control that can be gained by using this type of selector is quite amazing when you think about it". I thought about it, but still think the book should have shown me why it is so "amazing")
How to create ANY layout - you can find the two mentioned on the web in 0.01 second using Google.

Finally, Sybex did a poor job proof reading this book (if they did it!). Beginners should not (and can not?) find and correct errors in code. I wrote Sybex to tell them about 12 specific problems between page 43 and 83 (there are plenty more). They replied "Sorry you didn't like it."

Molly Holzschlag has produced a well-crafted, clear and helpful book that fills a gap in Web site development literature. I had been looking for a primer on CSS that will prepare me for deeper treatments of the subject, and this book fits the bill.

Ive been using CSS for some time, but doing so timidly, confining it primarily to font specifications. This was partly because of the browser compatibility and compliance problems that have plagued CSS but also because I needed a better understanding of CSSs big picture. CSS: The Designers Edge certainly addressed the latter problem for me. After working through the book (doing all of the exercises), I have a much clearer picture of CSS, my CSS skills are much further along, and I have greater confidence in my execution of those skills.

I should note that Molly starts from the beginning. It is a book for the beginner and the intermediate. It is certainly not for the advanced CSS technician. In fact, if anything, I would have preferred that she had delved deeper into some of the subject areas, especially the box model and positioning in general. With that said, the book has allowed me to comfortably read on various topics that I wanted to know more about. And I now feel ready to tackle CSS on an advanced level.

What I really like about Mollys writing is her commitment to being helpful to her readers. I get the distinct sense that she really cares that her readers learn the material and learn it well. Besides being careful in presenting the material, she is always inserting valuable tips and practical ideas along the way that one usually only finds out about after long periods of trial-and-error.

I would have liked to have given this book four-stars. I give it three-stars instead. One flaw has prevented me from the higher rating. The book is laden with typos (confined primarily to the first half). It was as if Sybex (the publisher) paid the copy editor to sleep on the job. I e-mailed my displeasure of this directly to Molly. Im sure plenty of others have done the same. She is fully aware of the problem. Sybex has done the author a major disservice. Nonetheless, as annoying as the typos are, I think that the book is a valuable learning tool for developers who want a good intro to CSS.

At first glance, I was attracted to this book by its sleek page design. The information is well-organized, sections and chapters are clearly labeled, and there are full-color images included. But upon reading through just part of it, I was disappointed by the amount of pure "fluff" that is included! There is too much info about the history of the internet and html, which I think most people reading this book will already have a handle on. Also, code samples are repeated multiple times, adding a few lines each time, which is totally unnecessary. Finally, there are WAY too many typos! I think a monkey was the editor.

Another complaint I have is that the book doesn't get into the really fun, unique things that you can do with CSS. For a book that claims to be aimed at designers, the samples given are amazingly dull. Don't expect to be wowed! Only in the last two or three chapters are some more advanced techniques shown, and there is no code or explanation of how it's done. (Although a website IS given, and it is accessible at the time that I write this.) Maybe if the book wasn't so redundant about the basics, there would have more room to explain!

Now, having aired my complaints, there are some things I like about the book. Having thumbed through several other CSS manuals, including the much touted Eric Meyers books, I was struck by this books clear explanations and step-by-step examples. It is appropriate for beginners, who won't want to be presented with pages and pages of code. Pictures and colorful borders/highlighting liven up the text.

In sum, I definitely wouldn't pay list price of $45 for this book, but a nice used copy would be great for the beginner CSS writer.

The book takes about 200 pages to go through the basics of CSS and with color diagrams to demonstrate what the text was saying. And that is good.

But Chapter 7 "Reconstructing a Table-Based Site" is poorly executed. All you get for that chapter from the downloadable ZIP file are text files consisting of snippets of the CSS. But the main HTML file isn't included. I have no idea what was being styled.

Also, I wish the author had expanded upon using background image files as a substitue for Javascript rollovers which is briefly mentioned in Chapter 7.

I have Eric Meyer's book on CSS. That is a more worthwhile purchase. The "code" that comes with it is more complete.

When I decide what to review there are times when I choose something to help me out. In the case with this book I am working with a client to teach HTML and CSS and this book fits right into the CSS part of the course.

The use of effective CSS is and can be a vital part of web page design, which is why I was pleasantly surprised to find this book. The author breaks down the world of CSS into easy to follow and understandable guide.

More than just how to code, this book explains what can happen with the code. The author takes you step by step and not only explains the concept but also gives you a visual tour to enhance the learning process.

For my money this book certainly does what I need it to do. I found that learning and understanding CSS has gotten easier by the page. Overall an excellent job!

This is perhaps the best book I've seen on style sheets. It isn't overpowering in an attempt to cover EVERYTHING. The author does an outstanding job of showing just how simple style sheets can be. Many other books leave you with the impression that CSS is just another complex web discipline. For me, something very simply expressed in this book suddenly made me "get it" - The fact that background images and colors can be applied to ANY block-level element. This opens up all kinds of design possibilities. My site's table-based layout was so deeply nested that you had to search long and hard just to find the appropriate table data cell to place a sentence in. With this book, which has an entire chapter devoted to deconstructing a table-based layout and reconstructing it with CSS, I was able to reduce my site's pages down to a fraction of their original size, and now the mark-up for those pages looks more like an easy to read text document than a nightmare of table tags. The site looks exactly as intended in all browsers I've tried and has a pristine and sharp appearance. The changeover was fast and easy, and now, because of CSS, changes are as simple as changing a sentence in a document.
My only complaint with this book is that it had a great number of errors in the manuscript: Things like "and" just appearing in the middle of a sentence out of context. It appears that nobody proofread this manuscript. If someone did, he or she needs to go into a different line of work. Proofreaders can't be skimmers. Although this was annoying, and a shame in a large, colorful work, the author's ability to convey the material still came through. Her work was five-star. Sybex's work on getting it ready for print was 2-star at best. Still, it is definitely worth buying and is truly a concise, problem-solving book.

Bought this one in a hurry and was dissapointed when I got home. The author spends too much ink on staff (i.e web standards)she could have covered in one or two paragraphs. As a matter of fact the entire book could have been written in less than half the number of pages the author consumed with this book. After my dissapointment, I went online and in two hours I knew more on CSS that what the book provided. Online tutorials (which are free by the way)are lightyears better than what you will learn from this book.

If you are a designer used to WYSIWYG tools but would like to get your feet wet in CSS, then this is absolutely the book for you. Molly does a terrific job introducing all the basic concepts and the examples get you up and running in no time. I couldnt recommend a better book for the CSS novice.

For someone new to CSS (and whose genes are not coded in hexadecimal), this is exactly the right book. Instead of providing a semi-random survey of a given technology or an exhaustive listing of its syntax (as so many other computer authors do), this author seeks to provide her readers with an understanding of that technology. Using clear and simple examples, she leads her readers through HTML, XHTML, and CSS in a way that provides a beginner with a solid foundation for understanding how best to approach web page design with CSS.

With this understanding in place, the reader will then be ready to move on to the "Technical Reference Manuals of CSS" that many of the other reviewers of this book seem to wish they had bought instead.