Book Review: HTML & CSS the Good Parts
By Dan Baker, published 2010-08-16
The book is called "HTML & CSS The Good Parts" Written by Ben Henick O'Reilly, Feb 2010 About 300 pages. Summary The book starts out slow (like all good information books), and explains several common "things" that most of us have heard and use in conversation -- but, are explained very nicely. The flow of the book is excellent. Some chapters started out with a quick statement of, "If you aren't going to read this chapter, I highly recommend at least reading section XYZ." Review One area I truly enjoyed (and learned from) was the HTML layout concepts littered throughout the book. A specific example would be found in Chapter 6, where general layout concepts (header, footer, sidebar, main content) are described nicely. Then, several examples are shown how to create simple HTML using div's that makes the HTML very human-readable. But, more importantly, highly customizable through easy CSS. This method of first describing some problem and second showing at least one marvelous easy solution to that problem, is used through the book. These simple solutions are generally easy to understand, and easy to remember. And, surprisingly easy to implement. This last point is important. Several books will explain a solution, but the solution is so complex that the reader may implement it once, but toss the knowledge the next time the same problem arises, because of the complexity of the solution. Easy of implementation is important, and is true for most solutions found in this book. About Me I've been a professional computer programmer since 1981. I've written code to parse CSS, and paint content (not in a browser) using those parsed rules. I've always thought that I knew a lot about HTML and CSS. With that in mind, I have increased my personal understanding of HTML and CSS by simply reading this book.