Customer Reviews

HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS (Build Your Own)

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

This is an okay book as an introduction to CSS and what would be possible in CSS-2. Unfortunately, support for CSS-2 is extremely limited, so you'll often read about some cool trick you could do if browsers supported it. While some people may like that, this doesn't help people who are looking to create practical web sites today, not in 2 years.

The book also barely scratches the surface of layout using CSS instead of tables. The author barely tells us how he did the sample site, and shows no other examples of this technique and variations on it, or ways around common problems. The book spends much more time on introducing all the specifics of using CSS for font properties instead of layout. The CSS-2 reference in the back may come in handy in 2 or 3 years when designers can actually use it.

The author's style is also not fun to read. He spends more time telling us what he's about to talk about than on the content itself. The book is honestly just a collection of lots of CSS stuff you could learn from plenty of free web sites, ...There's no originality here at all. Actually, if you read articles online long enough, you can learn much better stuff quicker than you could from this book.

Finally, the book costs [dollar amount] and is printed on regular stock paper in black and white. For ... more [money] you can get Eric Meyer's incredible book "Eric Meyer on CSS," printed in full color on glossy paper, showing examples much more clearly and step by step, and with lots of very practical and original advice. I got better information on CSS from one chapter in my beginning web design textbook than from this book.

This book should have been titled something like "CSS and CSS 2 Introduction". It has almost NOTHING to do with using CSS instead of tables. In fact, it's only covered in one portion of the book, and just barely touched on. Further, it gives little to no practical methods of using CSS instead of tables. In a book such as this you'd expect to see examples of layouts that would normally use tables and then step by step guides on how to make it CSS. Not so.

This book is a good overview of CSS, a TERRIBLE book on using CSS instead of tables.

I got this book hoping it would provide me with an overview of CSS and how to practically use it to design a site using only CSS. While it did provide a good overview of CSS in general and the syntaxt I was disapointed because the book did not provide a hands on guide to practically using CSS to design a site. There is an example site mentioned throughout the book and one chapter is devoted to all the CSS used on that site. However instead of providing a detailed explanation on how to think about design and layout using CSS and the example site like I was hoping the author simply showed the CSS code for each major component of the example site and then simply introduced the new syntax. No explanation of why that code was used and how it fit into the overall CSS design/layout strategy. After reading this book and then many websites to get up and running I finally rebuilt one page of my site. As it turns out it is actually a tiny bit larger (file size) than my all tables site. I'm now looking for another book that teaches how to use CSS in a practical web design environment.

If you want to learn to do CSS tabless designs, then dont buy this book. This book is a waste of the paper it is printed on. If you want the CSS2 Reference, they buy another book or print it out from the web.

The author has a lofty goal, but unfortunately did not have a good plan. Again if you want a tabless site, go to google and type in tabless css. Spend a few hours doing those tutorials and you will know more than if you spent any time reading this book.

This book is OK as a general CSS guide, but it fails miserably at what it was intended for- teaching you how to create a tableless CSS layout. In other words, it's outright cheating by the author, which no doubt used such a title for the book just to distinguish itself from other CSS books. The problem is, there is less than 1 chapter discussing using CSS as layout in a book that's supposed to be all about it. You can't help but feel cheated. I knew more about using CSS to replace tables going into this book than what the author taught me coming out. The one technique discussed- using absolute positioning to replace tables- is so inadequate and poorly illustrated it pushes you back into wanting to stick to using tables. Oh yes, and half of the book is a CSS reference that's there just to fill pages and make the book appear thicker than it really is. Without the reference this book becomes a booklet, just like their php/mysql book.

This is the last time I buy Sitepoint books. There's a pattern emerging here with their books- low quality print, low quality content, poor editing job, and misleading but hyped up marketing (not to mention very high prices). I'll stick with the professional publishers like O'Reilly from now on.

I'm not going to state that this particular book is useless alltogether, but, I would like to warn you about sitepoint.com which to me seems to be a book publisher's equivalent of the Scientology Church. Once you download sample chapters from their website (which is actually a pretty nice thing byitself) they follow up with a relentless marketing sequence which is almost semi-spammic, while treating you like some fool who's ready to accept anything they claim, and they always claim that their books are extraordinary, great, the best, i.e. next to, or just that, perfect, and sort of show off the customer feedbacks they receive etc, basically this is about very old types of sales gimmicks that most people should be able to recognize. (Scientology? well, it seems like from reading at their website and their emails, that sitepoint is the one and the only soloution to your problems)


These books are also hideously expensive. Once after I replied to one of their marketing emails which comes as constant followups, as if you're an idiot and don't comprehend where to buy your books if it wasn't for them, the dude tried to lure me into buying their book of close to $50, with a silly 10% discount, and he used an aggressive tele-marketing style approach, like he was trying to sell just to increase his comission. Now I go there only to download free sample chapters, and encourage you to do the same. Then if you like what you see you're simply free to buy it, but if you don't, well then at least you managed to parasite one chunck of merchandize for free. Particularily in this case, with CSS, you can get SAM'S for $24.99, and there are plenty of CSS books that are much cheaper and possibly much better than this one. And there IS not that much to talk about in CSS. It's not a programming language and much tend to be overkill that's there to fill out the pages. I have to add that CSS, the basic webdesign part of the syntax, is very easy to learn. In fact you could use some online tutorial to grasp most of it. The few principles involved can't possibly occupy hundreds of pages unless the author fills half of the book with nonsensical boredom.

I think this book is a wonderful overview of CSS1 and some coverage of CSS-P (Positioning). Given the title, I was led to believe that there would extensive coverage on how to take table design into a design without tables through use of CSS-P. However this was not the case, and as such I was sorely disappointed. I think a more representative title would be "Designing with CSS". I could go into details, but I think you get the point.

Another thing to note about the book was the excessive price in contrast to the quality of the printed pages itself. The book looks as if it was xeroxed at Kinkos or a copy/print shop near you.

I had high hopes for this book. I was ready for something completely dedicated to teaching me everything I needed to know about creating a site without using a single table tag for layout. Although the book does explain how to do this, I was still disappointed. After a brief introduction about CSS (yet again), section two of the book explains how to create layouts without using tables. In all, seventy pages of 500 are centered on this topic. Half the book is a CSS reference. The other sections talk about fonts, colors, etc. Clearly, the book is mis-titled. This remains a good book for someone new to CSS, so they can avoid bad habits from the start.

I finally finished a book I had been very excited to read: HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS by Dan Shafer, published by SitePoint. It is a good book depending on what your expectations are of the content.

For my part, I had expected the book to focus on layout. The book is nearly 500 pages, so I had expected an examination of many different kinds of table-based layouts with a look at how to recreate those layouts through the use of CSS, particularly what layouts were possible with creative uses of positioning, box properties, and background images.

However, this topic only occupies 80 pages, and only one kind of layout (three column plus header and footer) is examined in detail, with some variations being mentioned. So, I was disappointed in this regard, as I had expected the book to be predominantly focused on the subject of replacing various table-based layout methods with CSS-based layout methods, and this actually is only a small part of the book, and not nearly addressed in the variation and detail I would have liked or found useful as a developer. There are certain table-based techniques that are particularly challenging, if not seemingly impossible, to do with CSS, and a book specifically focused on that topic would have been (and still would be) immensely useful to me. That is not this book.

Having said that, this book does have a ton of useful information. It addresses many common design tasks, and it also is painstakingly clear each step of the way on which browsers support which techniques. This dovetails nicely with the complete CSS reference in the back. The book (including the reference) also deals with CSS3 properties and how they can be used now as well as what to look forward to.

The first part of the book is, unfortunately, the most superfluous. It seems like every CSS book out there, no matter how advanced, feels like there should be a introduction to CSS in case someone picks it up who doesn't really know what CSS is all about. In a book dealing with this particular topic, though, this seems like a waste of space. CSS beginners are not going to buy this particular book to learn CSS - they'll get a book about learning CSS. I would really like it if we could stem the tide of "CSS is great" generalist books and start seeing CSS books that focus on specific complexities and topics, leaving the ground work for other books. If I bought a book on the use of .NET Reflectors, I wouldn't expect there to be a "What is .NET" chapter or an introduction to C#. As it is, the inclusion of this overview of CSS doesn't really work out - it's not enough information to teach a beginner, and it's almost completely unnecessary for the intermediate or expert level. Having said that, this section is very thorough, and you might find yourself picking up some info on rarely-seen selectors or pseudo-classes or snags in the cascade that you didn't know.

The next part focuses on layout, and this comes the closest to why I wanted the book in the first place. It continues the hallmark of the book being very thorough in covering all the relevant properties, tricks, CSS levels, and browser compatibilities. It revolves around the CSS creation of a three-column layout with header and footer, and discusses various ways the layout could be done and the issues with both. Although other kinds of layout are not specifically addressed, you can easily use this information to create other kinds of layouts - the techniques and issues will be similar. I would have liked to have seen more integration of the graphical/design parts of a CSS based layout - tricks and creative uses of images, etc. Even so, this is good stuff, and it will give you all the pertinent information for converting your general table-based layouts to CSS-based layouts. The site that is used as an example involves some tricky areas which the book addresses. My major complaint about this section is the length - far too short, especially for a section that essentially gives the book its title.

The third section deals with colors, fonts, and some graphics. Once again, for most CSS designers at a level for whom this book would be useful, a lot of this information is old hat. However, due to the extreme thoroughness of the book, you will still learn something - obscure uses of certain properties, CSS 3 properties, etc. It is here that one gets the sense that the author is getting tired of writing the book. There's lots of information, but when it comes to application or demonstration, we begin to see an increased number of "I'll leave this to you" or "If you're interested, you can look here for more information." It starts occasionally, but these instances really begin to pick up speed until we get to the last section, which almost entirely refers everything back to the reader or some other source.

The final section (before the reference) deals with CSS miscellany than can be used to enhance the user experience as well as validation and backwards-compatibility. This section almost exclusively follows the pattern of: raise issue - summarize issue - tell reader to go somewhere else to learn about issue. It was annoying. I found myself wondering why the author even mentioned the issues if he wasn't going to give any helpful information on them. Obviously, this is a generalization, but it applies to nearly every topic discussed in this section. Very few helpful techniques are given. It gives the impression that the author was just getting tired and was trying to discharge these topics with as little effort as possible. It stands in stark contrast to the other sections where the author has been painstaking in detail and scope of information.

The reference section in the back is worth being on every developer's bookshelf. It details some very obscure portions of the spec, including the various at-rules. It also contains a thorough index of all CSS properties from levels 1 and 2, proprietary properties, and even includes the proprietary Mozilla versions of some CSS 3. The properties are defined, possible values are listed and explained, code samples are given, and browser compatibility issues are addressed. This happens with each property, making for a long, but amazingly useful, reference.

All in all, I do recommend this book. Its thoroughness gets into some nooks and crannies of CSS that may be dark even for those familiar with the standard. Also, if you're wanting to make the leap into CSS-based layouts, this book will generally show you everything you need to know for basic CSS layout work. However, the book is certainly not a "cookbook" for various layouts, nor does it really explore how images can affect layout issues. It's a good book; just check the table of contents to make sure that it meets your expectations for content.

I have been developing software for over 18 yrs. In that time I have bought hundreds of computer books. This book is by far the worst computer book that I have ever purchased. After reading this book, I had to look at its cover again to make sure I had the correct title. This book claims to be a practical step-by-step guide to teach you how to design web sites without tables using CSS, but it doesn't even come close. This book should be called "An overview of CSS with a special 200 pages of Reference Filler". I don't need another overview of CSS and I already have several good reference books. I made the mistake of buying this book off the Sitepoint web site before it became available on amazon. The marketing hype and false reviews on that site fooled me. Trick me once Sitepoint, shame on you, trick me twice, shame on me.