Lamentable and annoyingThis is a book which becomes increasingly annoying with each reading. The editorial team were either asleep or, more incredibly, actually share the five authors' facile sense of humour which strangles the text and patronises the reader.
The case studies introduce too much extraneous information and, for me, are unsuccessful; the points they address could have been made more succinctly without them. Building chapters around case studies makes it difficult to find the specific information subsequently - this is exacerbated by completely unhelpful entries in the table of contents (e.g. "A glimpse into a Classless Future (Not a Socialist Manifesto)" [drum roll, cymbal crash], or "Love your body Even More Tomorrow" [ho, ho]).
Instead of going into a second edition, Wrox press should have pulped any stockpiled copies and fired this team of jokers.
I would recommend prospective purchasers to avoid this book like the plague; there are better books which cover CSS more professionally and thoroughly.
It is not possible to give a rating of zero stars, so please do not take my 1* rating as any kind of commendation.
Very average, too many (poor) jokes, not enough insightI bought this book to have a deep understanding of the CSS paradigms and how best they match problems faced by Web designers who cannot assume a speficic screen size or format (i.e phones and desktop screens).
How disappointed I am! The book tries to joke with the reader all the time in a very condescendant way (page 12, "This should-oh, you get the point. Happy yet?". Rather than explaining in an generic fashion what the problem is and what the solution is, the reader is inundated with numerous examples of the same symptomatique issue page after page. Once again, do the authors think that we cannot grasp very basic abstract concepts? Is it a tentative to fill up the requested minimum number of pages set by the editor?
This book is at best a cookbook, at worse a waste of time. It does certainly not provide any insight into CSS and won't help you design your website both for desktop screens and smartphone screens.
These CSS books are getting better and betterThere have been quite a few CSS-related books released of late, a trend that is following the larger number of sites build with web standards.
Whereas a book such as 'Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook' by Dan Cederholm is great, this book excels because of its examination of standards built sites such as blogger.com and the us pga tour golf site.
There are a large number of examples, and the book is generally well written.
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