Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook [Paperback]

I've had the book since it was published, and since then it's not left my desk. It's taken up residence right next to 'More Eric Meyer on CSS', which ought to give you an indication of how good Dan's book is.

Rather than concentrating on a technology and just showing you all it's bells and whistles, this book uses a better approach. It states a common design problem and then presents multiple standards compliant solutions. Dan then takes you through each one of those solutions and shows you the good and bad points of each. You not only learn -how- to code well, you learn -why- it's good code in the first place, and that's important.

Dan's writing style is friendly, clear and does an excellent job of making you understand what's being said, so you feel confident about transferring the books examples into your own website. It's written in a way which should be easy enough for a beginner to understand, but isn't patronising. I would expect most web professionals will learn a lot from this book too (I should know, I'm one of them).

This is a great book and highly recommended.

I've been using CSS for a couple of years now, and although I was familiar with many of the techniques contained in this book, there were many moments of 'aaaah!' during the course of my read; litte things that can really make the difference.

If you're reading this review, then it's quite likely that you're interested in implementing web standards in your web sites.

This, when complimented with books from Meyer and Zeldman, should form the core of any serious web developer's library.

No hesitation in giving it five stars.

Jeffrey Zeldman's book "Designing with Web Standards" put me on the right track, but I must say that "Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook" pushed even further down the track.

First of all I must say I like this book. I like it a lot! It is truly an impressive book! I was amazed by the speed of which I was able to consume the contents. It gives you a practical insight how to do some common tasks, e.g. a menu, a form etc. All the things that you used to do with tables, spacer gifs etc. are turned upside down. The book is well written, with no-nonsense (although a bit corny here and there) how to do common tasks according to standards. It's exactly to the point and no space is wasted anywhere. It's in no way an academic overview on 'web standards' but a down to earth how-to book.

This book really gives you a different perspective on how to do webdesign. If you have coded a little bit of HTML, with or without knowledge of web standards, this is the book for you. Unlike other books, this one doesn't hit you in the head with the dreadful web-standards-hammer. I cannot recommend this book enough. Excellent work!