Laura Lemay's Web Workshop: Designing With Stylesheets, Tables, and Frames [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)

~ (Author), Molley E. Holzschlag (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

These two books are invaluable for serious web designers. Holzschlag provides a detailed, advanced training guide in web design with lots of examples, illustrations, and explanations of what to do and why. Schmeiser's presentation is even more interesting because she eschews advanced explanation and training in the traditional sense. She does offer pages of illustrations of the templates that can be found on the CD-ROM. The reader sees something neat, swipes it off the CD-ROM, and then begins to understand the code by changing it to fit specific needs. The learning is actually more natural and intuitive. Schmeiser is for all medium-sized collections, and Holzschlag is the next choice.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Description

A hands-on reference for designing and creating stylish Web page layouts teaches the basics of stylesheets, tables, and frames, demonstrating their practical applications in a broad range of everyday Web design situations. Original. (All Users)."

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Product Details

• Paperback: 607 pages
• Publisher: Sams Publishing (June 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1575212498
• ISBN-13: 978-1575212494
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.5 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,248,044 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I loved this book - learned an awful lot very quickly., May 4, 1998

By	Joyce Richter ([e-mail]) (Lakewood, Colorado (Denver)) - See all my reviews

I am an experienced technical writer (10 years of software documentation) creating my first web page. I needed to learn tables and frames quickly. After patiently following the instructions (from Chapter 1 on), and manually entering the code from the samples provided in this book, I have learned enough html to do a page from scratch, and can implement tables and frames. In fact, I re-designed my web page twice-first using tables, then frames.

It's not a perfect book... I think I found all the typos in the code... but, searching for the errors reinforced my debugging skills. And nothing takes away the thrill of viewing the page and having everything click into place. Instant gratification!

All I can say to those who didn't like this book, is their learning styles must be different from mine. For me, it worked. And, I think manually entering the code (except for cheating on the Greeked text) did a lot to reinforce the concepts. This is a hands-on project... I am not a programmer, although I have had some programming classes. I certainly couldn't have grasped the elements by speed reading through the code. And, the graphics helped re-assure me I had everything in the right place.

This is my second Lemay book, and I can assure you I will be checking out the other titles.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Good Hype != Good Book, August 10, 1997

By A Customer

I read a lot of books and am always looking for something new. After I purchase a book I like to come to amazon to make comments. My comments are usually positive. I have found there are a lot of good books out there. When I came across this book I was looking for something to help me with these exact issues: style sheets, frame and table. I wanted a book that explored design rather than concept and I thought I would find it in this book. I read all the comments regarding this book and think that someone is doing a good job of trying to build hype for the book. First they trash it then they praise it. Then they trash it then they praise it.

In all honesty I must say this is the first book I have read recently that was really disappointing. Truth be told only a single chapter is this book has anything to do with style sheets. That chapter is chapter 3, "In Vogue: Cascading Style Sheets." This chapter dismisses style sheets as something that isn't quite there yet stating most browsers don't support style sheets while dismissing the fact that Internet Explorer 3.0/4.0 both support style sheets and so does Navigator 4.0 which does/will account for 90% of the browsers out there. More often than not the author discourages the use of style sheets yet at the same time invites you to try them. Strange to say the least. Beyond this chapter, there are other chapters that mention style sheets in passing, but nothing truly useful. By the time I finished the book, I was wondering what happened to the rest of the style sheet discussion. The author only touches on about a third of what you can do with style sheets leaving out two thirds of the discussion. The book is made worse because the author never even mentions the omitted material. For a 600 page book with style sheets as the first item in the title, this book does not measure up.

The book spends a lot of time on case studies of Web sites. There's hundreds of pages of nothing but source code and screen shots. Truth be told most of this is not explained. It is just presented. In summary Designing With Style Sheets Tables and Frames is a big book that really doesn't cover a lot of ground or present any new material and someone has done a good job of trying to build hype ala Create Killer Web Sites so definitely look before you leap.

3.0 out of 5 stars bugs? bugs! bugs!, April 14, 2001

By A Customer

I bought the book. I already work with basic html daily at my workplace. I entered the code of the first 5 lessons in BBedit and ran the BBedit editor. What a mess!!

tags are not closed, <tr> and <td> tags are not closed. The editor's mistake finder was running out of space. Did they bother to check and edit their work before the book went to print? Did they create a new version of HTML? Confusing to say the least! In the chapter about designing with side to side tables, they forget to mention that the space between the tables will stretch wider with larger monitors, which renders the effect unstable. I really wonder if the book was reviewed and edited before it went to print. What a pity, it could have been great.