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DHTML and CSS for the World Wide Web (Visual QuickStart Guides)
Peachpit Press (
February, 2001 )
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Readable with clear examples  |
I bought this book because I wanted to learn CSS from the ground-up. I had a vague idea about stylesheets but the book takes you through a broad range of the techniques you can use right from the beginning. The pros and cons of the different techniques are explained well and the examples used help put it all in context. I found myself revisiting examples from day to day as I was starting out with my own CSS. I found this the best approach, especially for the positional CSS, although some of the book is readable without trying out the code.I really liked the visual style of the book as its easy on the eye (it has some attributes of an informative magazine but with a book-like consistency). For example, some of the nuances of CSS are not embedded in a stack of text, but are brought to the readers attention in smaller blocks. The DHTML section was really just a bonus for me, but Ive used some of the simple animation scripts to good effect. The other useful stuff includes how you can change the style of a screen element through a user interaction which Ive also used. Finally, theres a good support web site, which has working examples and code & at the time of writing was still up and running. Just for the CSS section I rate this 4/5.
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Highly informative for a beginner in CSS programming  |
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I borrowed this book from the library and have used it every day for several weeks. It has proved an invaluable aid to me in creating dynamic web pages which are easily maintained. As with most of the Visual Quickstart series, the content is well laid out and easy to follow, yet comprehensive. I am now going to order my very own copy!
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A beginners book teaching you W3C DOM compliant DHTML |
Second Edition (June 2001) of this book is very good, and is - at the time of writing - the only DHTML book Ive seen which teaches you W3C standard DOM based Dynamic HTML. This is a very important point in my opinion, and it really makes it the one and only book to choose until other books gets updated or new titles emerges. W3C standard based DHTML are supported by browsers like Internet Explorer 5+, Netscape 6+, Opera 4+, Konqueror 2.1+, Mozilla and other Mozilla/Gecko-based browsers, and is _the_ standard "all" browser will support in the future. But the IE4 and NS4.x browsers are not forgotten, the book teaches you how to make your code compatible with these browsers too, even though they dont support the W3C standard DOM.The book has support and bug-information about various Netscape and Microsoft browser versions, but do not go into deeper details with the alternative browsers like Opera and Konqueror. Actually Opera is the only "alternative" browser which is briefly mentioned in the book. However the coding style used in the book always favours "feature sensing" over "browser sensing" when ever possible, so most code should work with the lesser known W3C DOM compliant browsers too. The book is split into two parts, a CSS-part and a DHTML-part. It seems like a wise idea to teach CSS before starting DHTML, since most people starting on DHTML problably havent used CSS that much yet. It is a beginners guide, not an advanced book. The style is typical of the "Visual Quickstart Guide". This means the book is designed to be a combined reference and a teaching-book. In my opinion the book can be a little boring reading from start to the end, because it has a tendensy to repeat things. For example when you have learned the basic CSS syntax for defining styles you dont really have to get it spelled out how the syntax is for every style-property in the rest of the book. Just mentioning the name of the property and the possible values should be enough, and you can always check the code-examples if in dought. This is problably a matter of taste, but it is the reason I can "only" give this generally very good book 4 stars.
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