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Sams Teach Yourself CSS in 24 Hours

Sams Teach Yourself CSS in 24 Hours

List Price: $24.99
Your Price: $16.99
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: An Otherwise Good Book Except...
Review: TOO many editing errors. Besides the fiasco with the Hour 2 figures being all wrong, and besides the online errata listing of errors that should have been caught, I STILL found many more errors. If you look carefully, you'll see them too.

A lot of the examples that I download have the wrong filenames as part of the first line comment. The filename in the comment does not match the file being viewed. This may be a minor thing, but it leads me to think that this was a rush job by the author.

In Hour 10, I found an HTML file where the wrong CSS linked file was being referenced. Before I figured that out, I thought that the problem was a browser incompatibility (but it wasn't). The HTML file "anthem-10fig04.html" references the CSS file "stars-10fig03.css" but instead it should be referencing CSS file "stars-10fig04.css" This will allow you to have the JPEG image on the link. You can change this yourself in the HTML but how could the author have missed that? Wasn't that tested?

I also found a couple of properties that IE6 doesn't support but wasn't mentioned in the book: [Hour 12 white-space: pre "whitespace-12.4.html"] and [Hour 13 border-style "border-style.html"]. I'm sure it was an oversight. There may be more.

There are some files in the samples that appear to be redundant like "causes2.html" and "causes.html" on Hour 18. There are files that are not being used at all like "k-alt.css" on Hour 18. Oh yeah, Listing 14.2 on page 237 doesn't make sense (compare the last sentence of that page with Listing 14.2 and with the corresponding CSS file you downloaded "lists-14.2.css". They don't match.). There are other things I could mention as well. I think you get the point.

All of this added up makes the book look really bad! I give 2 stars to the editing job done by the author. Don't try to pass this on SAMS editors: Kynn this is your baby. You should have thoroughly looked over the first copy. Nevertheless, I give the content of the book 4 stars though there are parts of the book that I had to re-read a few times to really digest what was being said.

So my recommendation to the CSS newbie is to go ahead and buy this book anyway. You will learn CSS despite of the sloppy editing. I just ordered the book "Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content from Presentation" by glasshaus which is getting good reviews on Amazon.[com] I cannot find a copy in the bookstores for browsing so I can't yet recommend that book instead of this one. I don't know if that book is intended for someone new to CSS like this book is.

If SAMS got Laura Lemay to write a "Sams Teach Yourself CSS in 21 Days," now THAT would be the book to get!

Good Luck,
George

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Absurd
Review: While I typically would not review a book until I have finished reading it, I was so ticked off after chapter two that I decided to share my observations. While typos and grammatical mistakes are common in technical books and usually don't bother me, scewing up 3 screenshots in one short chapter is absurd.

There are five screen shots in chapter 2. Of those five, 3 of them are not displaying what the author is stating should be present. Specifically, figure 2.1 on page 23, figure 2.2 on page 24 and figure 2.4 on page 35 are displaying the wrong screens. For instance figure 2.1 is suppose to display editing a style sheet using notepad. Instead, it displays a screenshot of the actual webpage within Internet Explorer.

This book may still be worth the money but buyer beware.


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