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  Books Bulletproof Web Design: Improving flexibility and protecting against worst-case scenarios with XHTML and CSS (2nd Edition) (Voices That Matter)

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - A good book but...
Some useful tips on creating good semantic markup. However, the author tends to build his case for this markup by citing tables on a lot of examples and the arguments to switch to a DIV structure. In some ways, I found this amusing as most of us know the benefits of table-less designs. The book reads more like a story telling similar to many technical analysis stock chart books I read based on past hindsight that no longer is relevant.

I bought this primarily to read about the indestructible box example. But I have to say after reading this that the markup is too narrow in scope. Not every box is going to have a DIV followed by an heading tag to create the rounded corners. Not only that but it was a fixed width example too so how can this be "bullet proof". Rather, the author should have come up with a generic solution so that the box can be sized width wise and lengthwise. Many people use a CMS and the markup to create a box is different.

All in all though its a good book to follow along to see how one goes about doing actual design in CSS. There's very few books out there like this that teach design while taking a hands on approach.



Rating: 3 out of 5 stars - Recommended but...
Most of the solutions are very good but the "problems" behind quite a few of these are non-existing or not important at the most.
The rest of the subjects are OK and if you are prepared to skip about 1/3 of the book I can recommend it.



Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - Very practical and offers excellent practices
I have been a so-called "table monkey" and have been longing to become a human being. So I picked up this book.

Throughout the text, the emphasis is placed in creating an XHTML/CSS page that does not break, when the user environment and/or the browser setting are not what the site designer expect or anticipated. At first I was a little skeptical of the author's rather strict adherence to the design that does not break in situations such as, say, a user uses a very large font setting for better readability; such a consideration may be of little importance nowadays, since even Firefox 3 now "zooms" in and out the entire page contents by default, not just text fonts. Furthermore, for many web developers under pressure to produce web sites that just work "well enough" for most reasonable cases, it does seem like the practices that are recommended in this book seem to take a little more care and time than desired.

However, all the design ideas presented in this book are very well thought out, and it actually does not take much extra effort to implement, once a designer gets used to them. I am in the process of updating my web design skills from what I knew as a table monkey, and I assure that this book offers plenty of enlightenment to those in similar situations as I am. Good thing is that once I learned the techniques presented in the book, I can come up with other effective ways to use CSS to fine tune layouts. Using HTML tables still offer some advantage if you need to support older nonstandard-compliant (Microsoft) browsers, but the flexibility of CSS just cannot be beaten if the site designs require extreme attention to detail.

The only drawback is that the presentation of the XHTML/CSS codes is slightly too meticulous and verbose for someone who is already very proficient in reading them. It is also not a cheap book for the amount of contents. Highly recommended, especially considering that the good CSS support in most modern browsers has started allow us to transform ourselves from table supermonkeys to CSS subhuman.




Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - Best CSS Book I have ever owned
This is easily the best CSS book I have ever owned. It's very easy to read and provides excellent, and sadly few, examples. Most importantly, the author does a wonderful job helping the reader understand concepts and how and why certain things are implemented.

Other books are FULL of examples... although they usually lack the details that someone like me need. The details, writing, and illustrations make this book much more attractive. Sure, Bulletproof Web Design isn't the end-all of books of this nature. It's short. You'll need more books. But any serious developer needs to read this book.

If you like "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug, then you'll adore this one as well.



Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - Good book/Wish It Worked for Some things
I purchased this book in the hopes it would have fixed my floating issues. It did, to a point. A couple of the examples didn't work well with Firefox. I found this book was helpful to fix a few things, but I did find that I was able to find other fixes online. I still enjoy this book, I just wish it worked better with Firefox browsers.


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