Bulletproof Web Design: Improving flexibility and protecting against worst-case scenarios with XHTML and CSS
- ISBN13: 9780321509024
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
No matter how visually appealing or content-packed a Web site may be, if it’s not adaptable to a variety of situations and reaching the widest possible audience, it isn’t really succeeding. In Bulletproof Web Desing, author and Web designer extraordinaire, Dan Cederholm outlines standards-based strategies for building designs that provide flexibility, readability, and user control–key components of every sucessful site. Each chapter starts out with an example of an… More >>
Although I haven’t read through the entire book, first glance seems to be quite impressive. I look forward to gleaning information to help me with my future Web consulting.
Book content is excellent, but be prepared for disappointment with the paperback cover. It is not glossy and unlikely to hold up to regular handling. Plan on covering it with something reinforcing. In fact, the cover on my book also started curling within hours of unpacking it, before I even did more than flip through it.
New Riders is not the only publisher who seems unable to put a good cover on a paperback, but it mystifies me as to why that is, since so many publishers have no trouble with that aspect of book design.
I liked this book which helped me to understand the issues around rendering with stylesheets and XHTML. This is not helpful enough as the CSS and XHTML are rendered through JSPs and ASPs. The book falls short on explaining them and how these issues can be resolved at the web application level. If you are a JSP or J2EE developer involved with Web development, then you need to read “Core Security Patterns by Christopher Steel” that narrates the tricks, techniques and strategies for designing secure web applications.
I was disappointed – not because the CSS stuff is poorly presented, because it’s on the better side of average, but because to learn this book’s stuff, or try to emulate some of the examples, requires a knowledege of Photoshop. For example, you need to know how to create an image with a gradient applied to a canvas, or to create a 1 pixel transparent row within an image – something that your average person may takes weeks to learn on his own. Photoshop is not all that intuitive to just grab a copy and simply create an image that the author uses.
And the author’s website to support the book lacks the images we could use – just to get through with the book’s examples.
By the way, the images the author uses do not even specify their size, so even trying to recreate these images augments this inherent problem.
No More Tables!
I use this book at home and at work. It has helped me immensely in taking my designs to the next level.
I would recommend this book to anyone the least bit interested in CSS design