Posted by on Friday, December 11th, 2009 at 5:51 pm.
In this week’s web design video blog, we have been asked to review and share our opinion on a new book titled ‘Getting StartED with CSS’ by David Powers. In addition to the book review, Nick and James also talk about upcoming videos featuring Creare’s directors Mike & Colin. The video blog concludes with a look at a well known CSS website that David Powers mentions in his book – CSS Zen Garden.
Getting Started with CSS by David Powers
Getting StartED with CSS
Getting StartED with CSS is a book aimed at beginners and also HTML coders who may have previously been reluctant to embrace CSS. No prior CSS knowledge is needed as the author, David Powers starts at the beginning and with the most common properties.
However, readers are expected to understand the basics of HTML/XHTML as this book focuses purely on CSS unlike most combined CSS & HTML books. Please watch our embedded YouTube video above to see our review. Alternatively, you can watch our Getting StartED with CSS review directly on Youtube.
50% off at Apress ebooks
As mentioned in the video, the publishers are also offering members of the Creare community the opportunity to get 50% off the title at Apress ebooks.
Once you’ve chosen your title(s) on the website, click on the ‘Buy eBook’ button, enter the promotional code CREAREFH, click to apply the coupon and proceed to the checkout.
Video Script
Hi, and welcome to this week’s web design video blog. First of all we just wanted to give you a bit of Creare news, hopefully before Christmas we will be getting our directors Mike and Colin onto our video blogs to talk a little about Creare and what they think is going to be significant within the web design industry in 2010.
Early this week, we were sent and asked to review a new CSS book called Getting Started with CSS by David Powers.
So here it is, Both Nick and I have read most of the book. The publishers claim that the book is intended for beginners who don’t have any prior knowledge of CSS, but know the basics of HTML. The book sets out to teach you the principals and application of CSS instead of just showing you tricks.
Having both read the book, we believe that it is also a great reference for experienced users; and helps join the dots for those who have self taught themselves and picked up bad habits.
The book allows readers to understand all common aspects of CSS 2.1 and prepares you for the forthcoming CSS 3.
What we like about the book is how the author conveys the importance off CSS early on, to reassure readers that they are taking an important step. David also makes several bold references about how CSS cannot be mastered overnight, and takes practice to fully understand the relationship and unlimited combinations of different CSS selectors.
David is also passionate about having minimal html coding, eliminating redundant div tags and style attributes, resulting in a higher content to code ratio which is excellent practice for SEO.
I we had to make a criticism and this applies to most coding books, we believe that having colour coordinated print that matches the code view of Dreamweaver for example, would better help the reader distinguish between the various elements of CSS code, however this would inevitably push up the price of the book.
In conclusion, this is a great reference for those wanting to understand and learn CSS from scratch, and also acts as a great top up for experienced CSS users looking to refine and optimise their methods.
Most books about CSS are combined with HTML to give an overall understanding of website coding, however this dedicated book on CSS fits nicely into the niche of designers who already understand the basics of HTML.
The book’s publishers have been kind enough to offer our viewers the book at a discounted rate, so please take a look at our supporting blog post for more information.
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