Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A well written disappointment, 18 Nov 2008
The title should have been a warning to me - I know a lot about CSS and it simply cannot all be wrong. Actually, many things I know about CSS have come from other SitePoint books so I'd have been very irked if this book lay waste to it all! So, if that's not really the case, then what does this book have to say..?
This book is rather a one-trick pony. I can save you twenty quid and tell you that you should be using css table styling to control your page layouts. HTML tables are naughty but css table styling is not. Hooray, long live table layouts, full length columns are back on the menu. And everything else is "wrong".
Except that IE8 is the first IE version that will support them, as this slim pamphlet explains very nicely. IE8 is still in beta so it's a bit premature to be calling IE7 the "old version". As such, it is too early to fully adopt the "non-wrong" way of doing things as advocated by this book.
Anyone who knows their CSS is already eager to put to good use the approach that this meagre book explains. But Rachel and Kevin's thorough treatment of this minor branch of CSS does not magically wind the clock forward to such a time that we can.
If I spent 20 pounds attending a seminar where I merely heard what I already knew, but was not in a position yet to implement, then I would not feel especially hard done by. Likewise, this single-sitting read is a well written history of the problem (of table vs. css layouts) and a mouth watering vision of the future (when IE6 and IE7 join IE5 in browser heaven/hell).
But don't lose sleep folks. Everything you know about CSS is NOT wrong.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Very disappointing book, 24 Nov 2008
They've been hyping up this book on Sitepoint for weeks and, after just reading it, I have no idea why.
For the price, I hadn't expected this book to be half as thick as other Sitepoint books, and only really contain information about one CSS property. This should have just been an addition to the existing CSS Reference book/web site.
It is trying to promote CSS table layouts as the new way to layout web site designs, but without IE8 being out until next year, and still needing to support IE6 and IE7 when it is out, the solutions offered in this book (using conditional commenting) makes so much extra work that I ended up wondering what really were the benefits of using CSS table layouts. Having not built a web site using HTML tables for layout before, I find that this layout doesn't seem as logical as the book assumes. I'm sticking with floats for the foreseeable future!
If, like me, you have assumed that it would have more about new specifications to CSS3, rather than just being about CSS table layouts, and you're after that kind of reference, I recommend the last chapter of Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design (Voices That Matter). It covers far more than this entire book in just one chapter.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
When WRONG is RIGHT!, 19 Nov 2008
This book promises so much for those that face the daily battle of building cross-browser compatible websites. Unfortunately it just doesn't deliver.
Don't get me wrong, in a Brave New World where we're all reading from the same web browser this book would be soma. But as we all know this just isn't the case.
Also don't get fooled by the mention of contributions by those that IMO are pushing the CSS envelope - Cameron Adams, Andy Clarke, Jonathon Snook and Derek Featherstone. Their contributions amount to nothing more than a few paragraphs each of heading nodding agreement with this books main selling point, which unfortunately isn't `one-size-fits-all'.
"Everything You Know About CSS Is Wrong" - it might be, but so far I've had no complaints.
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