Amazon.com Customer Reviews
promises Utopia, delivers something less - Review written on July 02, 2005
Rating: 3 out of 5
The book has some value, but precise communication is not one of its strengths. Perhaps that is why the author is so profilic (50+ books) - little time is spent on the details. Even the publisher's errata page contains multiple typos. The confusing errors I found (and the edition I'm reading has already been followed by three reprints) were not corrected in the errata.
For example, on p. 124 (first edition), it says "It is important to understand that when we talk about the width of a box, we are referring to its *content width*; we do not include margins, padding, or borders." This didn't seem to jive with an example given in the previous two paragraphs, as it would imply that it's normal for text in horizontally-adjacent boxes to butt up against each other. The book says this issue is discussed in Chapter 12, so I went searching through Ch. 12 for a while but couldn't find it. I then checked the CSS1 spec, and found that it explicitly shows (section 4) that "box width" *does* include margins and so on. What the book is referring to is the width property of an element, not the width of a box. Checking the errata web page, I saw that the issue is not discussed in Chapter 12 but in Appendix C under "width". Looking in Appendix C I see a description more in line with the CSS1 spec. However, even armed with this correction, the statements on p. 124 about the width of a box do not jive with the previous two paragraphs. No correction for the "width of a box" vs. "width of an element" error is given in the errata. The whole confusing episode took about 30 minutes to sort out. I now know more about the issue than I used to, thanks to reading the spec. But generally the purpose of reading a book is to save time vs. having to do the research yourself.
If you're a CSS beginner and only want an overview of CSS, with a passable explanation of the reasons for adopting it, this book is OK. If you want to get the details right, you're better off with the W3C CSS specification.
Good Book, but Watch Your Expectations - Review written on June 01, 2005
Rating: 3 out of 5
8 customers found this review helpful.
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.
Lousy Marketing Hype. - Review written on February 15, 2005
Rating: 2 out of 5
19 customers found this review helpful, 1 did not.
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.
My CSS Bible! - Review written on June 17, 2004
Rating: 5 out of 5
1 customer found this review helpful, 5 did not.
All the books offered by SitePoint are excellent. This particular book lives on my desk and has become my 'Bible' for CSS/Accessibility!
Easy to read, follow and use whether you are experienced or novice, SitePoint books are written in an understandable and concise style.
I am constantly watching out for new books that deal with the subjects relevant to my work and would purchase more books from SitePoint without hesitation. I have also recommended all the Sitepoint books to friends and colleagues as a first point of call when looking for literature of this nature.
Keep up the excellent work!
If it were possible, I'd give it "0" stars. - Review written on June 01, 2004
Rating: 1 out of 5
7 customers found this review helpful.
This is one of the worst books on the subject of building tableless web sites with CSS that you are likely to find. As many of the negative reviews have already mentioned, this book is mostly filler with little content at all about the subject.
And if no content weren't enough of a deterrent, it is overpriced to boot. Way overpriced!
Forget this book, it is a huge waste of money and of your time. Buy a book by the preminent CSS guru, Eric Meyer. You'll be much better off in the long run and you'll have money left over.
High cost, low value. Stay away from this book! - Review written on April 24, 2004
Rating: 1 out of 5
5 customers found this review helpful, 3 did not.
I have frequented the sitepoint website on several occassions. It is basically a website purporting to be a source of information for designers while really being nothing more than a hype machine to sell their publications.
This book is much like the website of sitepoint. Much hype with little substance. While there is some filler in this book that might be helpful to the CSS neophyte, it is certainly not a book with a singular focus on designing table-less websites using CSS.
I'm afraid this book will do little more than lighten your wallet and lessen the available space on your bookshelf for books of more substance.
It's About Time! - Review written on April 01, 2004
Rating: 5 out of 5
4 customers found this review helpful, 5 did not.
I have to disagree with most of the reviews regarding this book. Mr. Shafer has been there from the start where this area of web development is concerned, and I found the book an invaluable tool as a college IT student. The CSS reference is thorough, accurate, and conforms to the W3C recommended standards.
Mr. Shafer demonstrates a talent for taking what could prove to be a large and complicated subject and simplifying it so even beginners can understand. The author also effectively hammers the point (and rightly so) that there is an important necessity in separating web content from how the content is presented.
So the book is a bit on the costly side, so what? What computer books aren't these days? That cost is offsite in the valuable references provided in the book. If you're a web developer or designer who has grown tired of strong-typing those insipid
tags, or mucking through hundreds of lines of HTML code with thick layers of nested tables, this book is definitely for you!I believe the title is unequivocally accurate, and I happen to think Mr. Shafer knows EXACTLY what he's talking about. It's about time somebody put a topic like this in perspective.
The biggest problem with this book - Review written on November 25, 2003
Rating: 1 out of 5
26 customers found this review helpful, 1 did not.
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.
Better Books on the Market - Review written on November 24, 2003
Rating: 1 out of 5
18 customers found this review helpful.
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.
High Expectations, Disappointing Delivery - Review written on November 21, 2003
Rating: 1 out of 5
94 customers found this review helpful, 3 did not.
The title of this book - 'Designing Without Tables Using CSS' - led me to believe that I'd found a tutorial to teach me how to develop a Web site using CSS for layout. The subtitle further stoked my enthusiasm: 'A Practical Step-by-Step Guide'.
Boy, was I disappointed...
The second half of the book is a property reference undoubtedly culled from various online sources. The first 100 pages of the book trundles through the obligatory, tiresome overview of CSS that really has no place here. The rest of the book does focus on building a table-less site, but the author has not logically arranged his material and instead of delivering an annotated tutorial wanders hither and yon, discussing topics that sometimes pertain to the site he is trying build, and sometimes not. It seems that the author couldn't make up his mind, on a page-by-page basis, whether he wanted to write a CSS tutorial, overview, or reference. As a result, he failed at them all.
The quality of the writing itself isn't bad. The author has a friendly, readable style. In places, though, his pen runneth over, and a good editor could have tightened things up.
This book could have been done in half the pages if the author had focused on the tutorial and left the overview and reference for other books. A good printed tutorial on 'Designing Without Tables Using CSS' would have been invaluable. The author should have had faith in his material and written one.
At $39.99, with no Amazon discount, the book is grossly overpriced. It does have one of those nifty spines that let you lay the book flat without it closing, but there is no interior color, and both the paper and the print quality are sub-standard, leading me to believe that the book was published by a vanity press instead of a commercial printer.
You can judge the book for yourself by going to sitepoint.com and downloading the first couple of chapters. Read before you buy.
Misleading Title - Review written on September 12, 2003
Rating: 2 out of 5
15 customers found this review helpful, 1 did not.
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.
Don't believe the title - Review written on September 11, 2003
Rating: 1 out of 5
23 customers found this review helpful.
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.
Extrememly deceptive title... - Review written on August 09, 2003
Rating: 2 out of 5
22 customers found this review helpful, 1 did not.
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.
Definitely worthwhile - Review written on July 15, 2003
Rating: 4 out of 5
14 customers found this review helpful, 3 did not.
Having struggled my way through "CSS: A Programmers reference" by Eric Meyer, this book came as a breath of fresh air. Comprehensive introduction for those that have little or no .css experience, great gap-filler for those that think they know it all.
A few reviews have made the asinine statement that the contents can be "easily found on the web". Well of course they can - as can just about anything you care to think of. I am a regular at alistapart, csszengarden, bluerobot et al - and all the imformation in this book will be imparted by them. However I am of the old school that quite likes having a book to leaf through for education and reference (and the reference section is comprehensive) - and I've yet to find a better book that meets that criteria.
The "bundling" of the best advice on the net is not a bad thing, it's a good thing. Save yourself a ton of surfing through innacurate and or irrevelent information by grabbing this book :)
Stellar! - Review written on June 11, 2003
Rating: 5 out of 5
5 customers found this review helpful, 5 did not.
Dan Shafer is truly a guru. From the first day I landed this book on my shelf, my already enlightened eyes were opened wider to CSS and standards-based web design. Within days, I reinvented my company site from a patchwork of standards and usability blemishes to an all CSS/content-and-presentation-separated site.
Thank you Dan and thank you Sitepoint for another great release.
Superb introduction to using CSS in web design - Review written on June 11, 2003
Rating: 4 out of 5
9 customers found this review helpful, 7 did not.
When people first start writing websites, they will inevitably use a WYSIWYG editor, which will inevitably use tables for layout and positioning. This is horribly horribly wrong, and NOT how the Internet is supposed to be designed. For those of you who have been into web programming for a bit longer and no the basics of CSS (i.e. using stylesheets) but need a clearer quide (which is easier to understand than W3!) then this book is certainly for you.
Importantly, it assumes little or no prior knoweldge of CSS. It explains many many important concepts in great detail in particular the major page elements and all about positioning. The whole book is based around a case study with full source code so you are able to see the techniques implemented in real time.
However, even if you are a zen-CSS master and know all there is to know about table-less CSS driven sites, then this book is still of use to you as it has one of the biggest most complete reference guides in the back.
All in all, this is an excellent "starter for 10" into the world of CSS.
P.S. If you don't know what CSS is (aka Cascading StyleSheets) - BUY THIS BOOK!