Customer Reviews

HTML & CSS: The Good Parts (Animal Guide)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I'm a professional developer, and have only recently begun writing front-end websites (mostly as a hobby) over the past year or so.

I picked up this book because I was looking for a detailed guide to HTML and CSS which covered best-practices, code minimization, and provided some real world examples of what to do, and what not to do when writing large website frontends.

In short, this book did NOT live up to my expectations in the least.

First off, this book is just shy of 300 pages of content, which could easily be summed up in ~10 pages. The author is EXTREMELY verbose, and seems to drag on and on with every little insignificant detail in the text.

Secondly, this book contains almost no code samples at all. There are very few code snippets throughout the book, and the ones that are provided are small, not rendered with any pictures near them (which is unforgivable, as they are supposed to show how certain CSS attributes can display data), and extremely simple. If the author would have added images / diagrams to at least show how the CSS snippets effect the design of the page, I would be slightly more understanding here.

Thirdly, this book doesn't really discuss the 'good parts' of HTML and CSS. Sure, it has chapters labeled Good Parts, Bad Parts, and Awful Parts, but it doesn't actually draw any meaningful distinctions between what is good, what is bad, and WHY.

Over all, this book is not worth the money. It:

1. Seems quickly thrown together.
2. Is far too verbose.
3. Does not have enough code samples / diagrams.
4. Has almost no real content.
5. Doesn't explain anything about the 'good', 'bad', and 'awful' parts of HTML or CSS.

I honestly can't recommend this book to anyone, as it is not geared towards beginners, intermediate developers, or advanced users.

This book gives strategic advice for how to use HTML and CSS. It's not a comprehensive introduction to HTML and CSS; that would take a much larger book. It reminds me of the Effective C++ books by Scott Meyers: advice on how to make good use of the language, not a syntax tutorial. It sometimes explains what to do but not how to do it. In those cases, the book gives links to a companion web site with more details. If you have some experience with HTML and CSS, but feel like you're not using the tools as well as you'd like, this would be a good book to pick up.

I appreciate that the author endorses the spirit of web standards without being a language lawyer. Sometimes you have to make compromises.

I am a graphic designer who gets off on both right and left brain activities. I like working on code. I am not a developer, but I do enjoy knowing how things work.

With that said, I have been struggling for the past few years to say with confidence that I am a web designer. At age 31, I was starting to feel obsolete because I just couldn't wrap my brain around HTML and CSS enough to feel that I really owned it. I could edit bits and pieces of things. I could grasp some general concepts. But all in all, I was lost. I could play checkers with code, but I could not build things.

I was at that point when this book came to me.

This book contained the context (the why, and the how) behind the disparate jibbly-bits floating in my head behind a website.

This is not a book that will walk you through a bunch of step-by-step tutorials. Those tutorials don't help me anyway. Design and development are not linear processes.

What was helpful (for me) was feeling like I had an expert with a willingness to speak above my head *just a little bit* and pull me along into a foreign language. It's not an easy read, but it was something I could curl up with on a couch with some coffee and dive into. Did it hurt my brain? Yes. But in that sense that I was really learning something. And that feels good.

I highly recommend this book for others like me who are transitioning from being a print designer to being a web designer who knows how web sites work.

I bought this book at the same time as Javascript: The Good Parts, hoping that it would teach me the most useful parts of CSS and HTML without being too verbose. That is exactly what the Javascript book did, but this one proved almost useless in that respect. Rather than present the important parts of CSS and HTML in a logical and comprehensible fashion, this book instead gives a lot of wordy advice apparently intended for people who already know HTML and CSS. Reading some of the glowing reviews on Amazon leads me to think that perhaps it's not worthless, but just misnamed. Perhaps a better name would have been "Essays on HTML and CSS Style." I'm not qualified to write a review of that hypothetical book. But if you are hoping to learn CSS and HTML, I don't recommend buying this.

This book is not a beginner's guide to web development, so those who purchase the book expecting to have their hands held through the basics be disappointed. "The Good Parts" is targeted at an experienced web developer who already has a solid knowledge of HTML and CSS and wants to take their skills to the next level. The focus of the book is on providing specific tips to take advantage of the various advanced features of HTML and CSS to really "kick things up a notch" with one's development.

By necessity, the book jumps around a bit (like I said early, if you want a thorough survey of HTML for beginners, look elsewhere). Chapters cover creating effective structure to your code, advanced CSS layout, various page elements (tables, multimedia, and forms) and typography. The typography chapter is especially useful, as this is an often abused part of web design and development. This book also has a very useful chapter called "The Bad Parts" focusing on the necessary evils of development, including dealing with Internet Explorer (especially IE6) and various inane portions of the standards.

I would recommend this book as a great reference in any professional web coder's library.

I haven't read the entire book, but I think I can still offer a helpful review.

I bought this book because I thoroughly enjoyed JavaScript: The Good Parts. I expected a short book that explained the important parts of HTML and CSS in a clear and concise fashion. However, I'm having a hard time getting through the chapter on CSS layout. Not enough explanation in some places, paragraphs that are hard to follow. Is it too concise? I think it was written for somebody who already knew CSS layout. Here's an example:

"An element with a float value of left or right must: ... Be contiguous with the element boxes of affected non-floated elements that it precedes in the source order, but not the contents of those elements. This behavior is quite relevant when composing multicolumn layouts."

I was left with many questions in my head after that.

There were many paragraphs in the book which made my eyes glaze over. I'm through struggling with this book.

This book is really horrible. Contrary to the title, it has no good parts. It is badly written, obscure, and will have you tearing your hair out trying to make sense of it.

Here is an example: CSS font-weight is dealt with in just one paragraph. Not only does this paragraph not give you any information about the values typically used in CSS (normal, bold, etc); instead it talks about font weight in the context of printing (referring to 'lightest', 'heaviest', 'Medium' and 'Book' - none of which are normal values in CSS. It then goes on to refer teh reader to two figfures which have nothing whatsoever to do with font weight but are in fact examples of font-family.

Run away as fast as you can.

This book may have some good parts in it but I never got to them because it is so poorly written. I found myself reading and rereading run on sentences to figure out what they say. After getting about 1/3 of the way through, I finally decided to stop torturing myself.

In the day to day use of HTML and CSS, most developers operate from a set of `go-to' practices, and once they find what `works' for them 90% of the time, they tend to stick to it. Then they forge ahead to working with engaging things like the behavior layer and back-end scripting. The first thing HTML & CSS: The Good Parts excels at is revealing intricacies in HTML/CSS that are often overlooked in the day-to-day grind.

Ben Henick's book gets you past the surface and into what makes HTML and CSS really tick. If approached like a Grey's Anatomy for the web, the seasoned developer can find plenty to chew on.

The author also gives readers working on large scale projects plenty to think about in terms of planning and structuring code intended for scaled growth. By laying down the most solid, comprehensive foundation for a large scale project, developers can avoid a lot of headaches as a web property mutates and expands (and they ALL expand, given any level of success).

I might not recommend this book to a beginner, but I might gift it to them with the caveat that it's there for when they're ready to truly know their medium inside and out. This book fills in the gaps nicely.

I have a good understanding of the basic usage of HTML & CSS. As someone who is relatively new to HTML & CSS this book filled in the gaps. The author presents great concepts and comprehensive descriptions about approach, methods, and application. I needed this book to supplement my current developing process. This book stands apart from all my other HTML & CSS references. It does much more than provide syntax with basic descriptions. It also provides history, IE handling, detailed methodologies, and more.