Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

My first hint that something was up was when I the first email. It came shortly after 3pm from Peter L. and said simply: "Whoa - top article, dude!!!! You're my daddy! Front page of Slashdot!"

For a moment I thought he was talking about a product release at ATI where I work, but I was thrilled to see that instead my latest book, Core CSS, 2nd Ed had been reviewed by Slashdot. Within minutes I had several other emails from friends notifying me of the event.

This is a big deal, since hundreds of thousands of people in the IT biz check out Slashdot every day – exactly the sort of people who might be interested in buying the book. And the best part is that it was a positive review! Here's the review:

Core CSS (2nd ed.)

Posted by timothy on Mon May 03, '04 03:06 PM
Simon P. Chappell writes "It used to be that a website could be standards compliant or it could be attractive and impressive to prospective customers, but it could almost never be both. Now with the rise of CSS compliant browsers, a new generation of web designers are finding that the old wisdom is ready to be retired. CSS technology allows a website to have both excellent, semantically indicated content and attractive layouts. Core CSS (2ed.) positions itself as a complete guide to all of this standards based goodness." Read on for the rest of Chappell's review.

Core CSS (2nd ed.)
author	Keith Schengli-Roberts
pages	818 (10 page index)
publisher	Prentice Hall
rating	6
reviewer	Simon P. Chappell
ISBN	0130092789
summary	A flawed diamond

What is CSS?

Cascading Style Sheets (the CSS part of the book's title) are a way to separate the content and presentation of a web page. The CSS file holds the presentation instructions, leaving the HTML to hold only the content. While CSS is a formal World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard, the adoption has been somewhat slow, with browsers only reaching full compliance with the base level of the standard within the past year or so.

So why is CSS useful?

CSS shines when it is used to define the style of a whole site. Want all of your headings to be the right shade of your corporate blue? No problem. Want every page to have the corporate logo on it's background? No problem. Whoops, got bought by GlobalMegaUberCorporation Inc. and need to change the colours and background logos in a hurry? No problem, just change the CSS definitions and your new corporate identity will shine out for all your customers to see.

What do I know about CSS?

I am a relative newcomer to CSS, having been laying out websites using tables since 1995. I had decided that it was time to learn how to bring my personal website up to speed with the latest standards, when I was offered the chance to review this book, so I took Prentice Hall PTR up on the opportunity. This review then, is from the perspective of one who knows HTML well enough to develop a couple of sites using only vi and who has decided to learn CSS.

Overview

The back cover blurb claims that Core CSS 2nd Edition is a comprehensive guide that shows both beginning and expert web developers all they need to know to achieve great results with the latest style sheet properties. It also claims to be ... the most complete and up-to-date CSS reference available. This review will explore those two claims.

What's To Like

The first thing to like about this book is that it does cover almost everything that it's possible to write about Cascading Style Sheets. I have included the table of contents below so that you can get a feel for the breadth that this book aims at covering. The writing style is clear and explanatory with an underlying conversational tone, quite suited to this manner of book. It is also obvious from the text that Mr. Schengli-Roberts does understand his subject matter very well indeed.

The biggest thing to like about this book, for me, is appendix B, an alphabetical listing of the defined CSS properties and values. This list covers 92 pages and is a key part of the whole book. Importantly, it doesn't feel like filler and gives an impression that care has been taken in devising this very useful resource. Each entry in the appendix gives an example of correct usage of each property, which as a CSS neophyte I appreciated greatly.

What's To Consider

This book carries a 2004 copyright, yet it feels old when you view the list of browser compatibilities for each property. While it does give compatibility information for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, it only covers Mozilla 1.0, it mentions Konqueror without any version details and completely omits Apple's Safari browser. This spotty coverage seems at odds with the rest of the book and really felt like a glaring omission to me.

Summary

This is a good book -- and if you're in the process of learning to use Cascading Style Sheets, you should certainly consider it for your collection. It is flawed by a poor selection of browsers for it's compatibility lists; while this may not be an issue for you, I found it quite irksome. This explains my review score and my description of this book as a flawed diamond.

This whole thing came entirely out of the blue – I had no prior warning that this was going to happen. Going by what it says in the review it sounds like somebody at PTR passed along a copy of the book directly to the reviewer. But as a consequence I was caught with my virtual pants down with regard to the book's supporting Web site, which had database problems, caused when my ISP changed server and the login/password sequences on me. When I got home I immediately set to work resolving the problem.

Some the comments saying that this definitely wasn't a book about PHP given the error messages especially rankled with me, since I teach a &@$% class on PHP/MySQL at the U. of T., so it wasn't hard fixing up the code, but what I did find frustrating was my ISP's obtuse way of instantiating a database on their system that was far from clear. I kept wondering why I couldn't get a connection to my database which I could see was there, and it turned out that I had missed on an "Add" function that I had already clicked on once to set up the login/password. There were several comments about the database problems on Slashdot – and rightly so – but at least I fixed the problem with little fuss.

I found most of the comments that followed the review disappointing. The first one I saw set the tone, and it was a dopey remark about DeCSS – this is the name for the code that helps decrypts DVDs in order to make copies of them and has absolutely nothing to do with CSS. There were also the to-be-expected complaints about poor CSS support in IE, and at least one person wondering what the purpose of having a book on the subject when so many online resources are available There were some good comments about online CSS resources like the CSS Zen Garden, and there was a predictable mini-war about how useful CSS actually is. I did add my own comment talking about Safari and why I included IE's CSS extensions, but I added it late in the discussion and as I write it hasn't been modded up to visibility.

It's great to get a (positive) Slashdotting. It'll be interesting to see what it does to my book's rankings on Amazon.

# posted by Keith : 8:10 PM  0 Comments