Sams Teach Yourself HTML and CSS In 24 Hours 107
r3lody writes "Sams Teach Yourself HTML and CSS in 24 Hours 8th edition, by Julie C. Meloni and Michael Morrison, provides the beginning and intermediate web designer with the tools needed to create standards-based web sites. The major focus of the book is XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2, but HTML 5 and some XHTML 1.0 are discussed. Overall, the presentation and content are very good. One small minus was that the publisher's site did not include downloadable examples from the book. I also found no errata until the latter parts of the book. Published in December of 2009, the 8th edition provides reasonably current information." Read on for Ray's review.
Each "hour" of the book includes a "What You'll Learn in this Hour" section at the beginning, and Q&A, Quiz and Exercises sections at the end. Most chapters also include a "Try It Yourself" section, indicating what you should be accomplishing with your own web site. The examples have color coding for the various tags, comments, etc., and the book's examples work with a number of browsers. Specifically, Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera browsers were used to test the examples. If you use the coding standards espoused in the book, your web pages should appear properly formatted across most computers. Handheld browsers are only covered briefly, in the section discussing media-specific style sheets.
| Sams Teach Yourself HTML and CSS in 24 Hours (8th edition) | |
| author | Julie C. Meloni and Michael Morrison |
| pages | 456 |
| publisher | Sams |
| rating | 8/10 |
| reviewer | Ray Lodato |
| ISBN | 0672330970 |
| summary | A very useful text on web page coding using XHTML and CSS. |
Overall, the book is divided into five parts: Getting Started on the Web, Building Blocks of Practical Web Design, Advanced Web Page Design with CSS, Advanced Web Site Functionality and Management, and Appendixes.
Part I: Getting Started on the Web provides the customary introductory material, suitable for beginning users. After describing the seemingly obligatory "history of the web", the first hour concludes with discussions of how to choose a web hosting provider – a topic rarely covered in the books I've read. The second hour teaches how to get web pages uploaded to a web server using FTP, and how to distribute content in a file-based structure without a server. The next two hours then cover the basics of XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2. For both XHTML and CSS, very clear instructions on how to validate your coding help insure that your pages follow the standards.
The next 9 chapters comprise Part II: (Building Blocks of Practical Web Design). This part goes into detail regarding web page coding. Starting with text alignment using paragraph tags and lists, the book has a good collection of text formatting tips using CSS as the preferred style methodology. Tables and links are covered in the next two chapters at a pretty standard level. I found the chapter on using color had a lot of good information, but I believe a beginning user would find it somewhat confusing – especially when hexadecimal notation is introduced.
The next three chapters of this part of the book cover images and multimedia. I liked the focus on getting the right sizing for photos and banners, and the tutorial on how to place the images on the web page (including wrapping text, image maps, and clickable images). I was disappointed in the limited coverage of tiling and GIF animation. The multimedia chapter was a pleasant addition – one I have rarely seen in web design texts. The discussion was tilted toward Microsoft technology, so my testing worked properly only under Internet Explorer at first, however I finally managed to get Firefox to deal with the embedded object. Some information was given for embedding YouTube links, also. I would have liked to have seen more information on the parameters for the WMP object coding. The last chapter in Part II covers frames – both framesets and iframes – with only basic information.
Advanced Web Page Design with CSS is the main topic of Part III. These six chapters dig into the important aspects of CSS alignment. One chapter focuses entirely on margins, padding, alignment and floating, and provides a nice introduction to the full discussion of the CSS box model in the next chapter. Reformatting lists was the principal target of the next chapter, leading to a discussion of navigation bars (horizontal and vertical) in the chapter after that. This is where I started picking up on some irregularities that escaped a review. For example, even though this was supposed to be standard XHTML, I noticed some list item ending tags missing from the examples. Granted, browsers still display the list properly, but this should have been caught before printing.
The last two chapters in this part cover modifying text display using mouse actions, and fixed versus liquid layouts. I liked the mouse techniques to modify a displayed image based on which thumbnail image the mouse is over. It's a simple little method that looks very nice on the page. The liquid layout chapter gave me some problems at first. My attempts didn't work the same under different browsers at first, but when I went back over them while writing the review, they worked just fine. I'm still at a loss to understand what was wrong, so I suspect those starting out may have a similar experience.
The final major part, Advanced Web Site Functionality and Management, wraps up some miscellaneous issues. First, they cover how to create a modified CSS profile to make the web page more print-friendly. The next chapter provides an introduction to JavaScript. Unfortunately, this is where I found some more non-standard XHTML code. Web-based forms are covered only at a high-level in hour 22. The authors do provide examples of each type of form field, with CSS code to neaten up the page, but it appears to be a very cursory handling of the topic.
The final two hours go over the basics of keeping your web site organized, and how to publicize the site on major search engines. The book wraps up with a final part for the two appendixes, containing useful links to further information and a general XHTML and CSS reference.
Teach Yourself HTML and CSS in 24 Hours appears to be a properly authoritative text that would help you create a standards-based web site. Like most texts of this type, it does not reference web design software such as DreamWeaver. Rather, it addresses understanding exactly what code standards-based browsers will handle, and how you can manipulate them to create exactly what you want. The two main disappointments with the book are the obvious errors in the later chapters, and the lack of downloadable examples from the publisher's web site. That said, the content is so worthwhile, I rated it an 8 out of 10.
You can purchase Sams Teach Yourself HTML and CSS in 24 Hours (8th edition) from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
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Re:I learned it ... (Score:5, Funny)
Ya, I saw the title and I thought "Really? That seems a bit long..."
Well, we all know that /. is way too advanced of an audience for this book. Wait for the review of the upcoming SAMS title: "Teach Yourself Writing Self-Aware Device Drivers with Brainfuck in 17 Minutes".
Re:I learned it ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Only 24 hours? (Score:5, Informative)
More likely, they mean "Teach yourself HTML/CSS in 24 1 hour lessons" or something like that. I found I was able to learn the basics of HTML & CSS in about an 8 hour day. The problem is the moving target HTML has become over the years, though even that is a minor adjustment. I think this type of books is probably o.k. for most people, but it would be better if they used a free resource like W3 School's free tutorials [w3schools.com].
Re:Only 24 hours? (Score:5, Informative)
The hard part of CSS was keeping track of, in exactly which manner, IE6 fucked it up. .gif after-life for bad browsers, CSS just got a whole lot easier.
Now that the holy Google has given us all permission to drop IE6, into flaming animated
http://www.quirksmode.org/css/contents.html [quirksmode.org]
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Amen brother. Scream it from the rooftops.
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Mod insightful, interesting, obvious genius, whatever. Do so with all your might. Countless hours wasted dealing with IE6. And just recently, too.
If it can be proven that IE's incompatibility with open standards is an intentional design decision on Microsoft's part (shouldn't be hard), then I'd love to see a legal precedent where every Web developer and/or their employers can send Microsoft a bill for the extra and otherwise unnecessary work. That'd be the way to end this practice.
Re:Only 24 hours? (Score:5, Insightful)
IE6 was the worse, but pretty much all browsers screw(ed) up pretty badly at one point or another. And HTML/CSS leaves a lot of the default implementations to the browser developers, so while there are many "implicit" agreements between Firefox, Safari, and even IE, they're not part of the standards. So its still a moving target. I remember back in the days of Firefox 3.0 (which isn't long ago in human years, but feels like forever ago in Web years). I would systematically assume that Firefox was right, and IE was not.
Until I hit display:inline-block, which at the time IE got right on SOME stuff, and firefox never got right at all. Took me a while to figure that one out :) (Its been fixed since then, but...)
Re:Only 24 hours? (Score:4, Informative)
That's because inline-block was originally a proprietary Internet Explorer property. It was added to CSS 2.1 years later, at which point the other browsers implemented it.
Pave the cowpaths (Score:2)
http://www.w3.org/TR/html-design-principles/#pave-the-cowpaths [w3.org]
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IE6 was the worse, but pretty much all browsers screw(ed) up pretty badly at one point or another.
True. Back when Netscape still dominated the browser market, they took a lot of flack for their private extensions to HTML.
And HTML/CSS leaves a lot of the default implementations to the browser developers, so while there are many "implicit" agreements between Firefox, Safari, and even IE, they're not part of the standards.
The vagueness is by design. You can't specify exactly what a given element will do, because there are all kinds of factors you don't know anything about: resolution, display size, color depth, etc. Unfortunately, most web designers still don't get this. Instead of learning the official description of an object, they just look at the way it's rendered on their particular setup and say, "
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Exactly. Some guys I know go "What do you mean I shouldn't be using Tables to layout my page?" because thats basically how it was done a long while ago. (Long in computer years, not human years).
Learning HTML and CSS are the easy parts of Web Design, and could easily be done in less than a day (I know I learned it pretty quickly). It's when you want to embed some other controls, or add some functionality, that web pages actually get complicated (Why isn't my PHP communicating with mysql properly?!?!?). Or e
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So what IS the alternative to a relatively scaled HTML table in CSS that works across all browsers?
As of a few years ago, I found none.
Tables are totally viable (Score:2)
And no, tables are not even a viable alternative. There are numerous reasons for why the enterprise level websites need to be coded semantically.
This is false, if popular.
The first clue should be the existence of screen readers and the widespread effectiveness of Google even before going way back before CSS (much less CSS positioning) was in common use. Heck, even Lynx had some surprisingly effective ability to filter out layout tables and still display tabular data as early as 1999. If layout-repurposed ta
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see liquid layout
There Isn't One (Score:2)
So what IS the alternative to a relatively scaled HTML table in CSS that works across all browsers?
There isn't one. Not really. Not yet.
A couple of people will show up and tell you that there is. I've spent five solid years implementing hundreds of arbitrary layouts mocked up in Illustrator. I worked hard to use CSS positioning and semantic markup whenever possible, probably know the craft better than most. And the conclusion I've come to is that even where the methodologies and hacks and workarounds can ge
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I'm still a tables guy- to me, doing anything remotely complicated in CSS is completely unintuitive and backwards, and requires ridiculous hacks before you even get to IE (no vertical alignment? lack of proper columns?). The real problem with web layouts today is that neither HTML Tables nor CSS were designed with layout in mind, so everything requires far too much effort to set up properly. To me, I'd rather deal with the (much smaller) hassle of using tables for layout than deal with the significant ha
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We write a lot of forms code here with table-ish output. I use a mix of table and div code to make things work reasonably. It's pretty fast and you can CSS the stuff you need to but still guarantee columns will line up the way they should.
Love the "CSS is awesome" mug someone else posted.
-l
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This is more or less what I do. The tables I make typically aren't 5-level nested monstrosities with spacer gifs and col/rowspans all over the place. It's usually only one or two levels deep, with the content placed into properly-styled DIVs with margins and paddings as appropriate.
It doesn't work perfectly (the DIVs wont grow vertically in any browser as they shouldn't, and the DIVs won't grow horizontally in IE6/7 with table cells like they should), but I refuse to deal with hacks like 100% heights, +10
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They probably should include a spreadsheet layout mode in CSS. Even if it still included all that ugly mess you have to do at least it could do some of it for you -- in the background where it belongs. That would make my life a ton easier. More than half of our applications are glorified interactive spreadsheets. I also wouldn't cry if they managed a way to append data column by column instead of <tr>, <tr>, <tr>...
-l
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Ok, I consider myself a pretty sharp guy, and I've been working with the web for ages, but I still can't use CSS without running into major problems every single time. Some of them are design issues, some of them are just me not being able to wrap my head around it.
For example, CSS doesn't have variables... so you can't say something like "headerColor = #5444BB" and just use that wherever you want the header color. What were they thinking!?
CSS also can't do math, so a simple construct like "width = 10px + 5
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Amen.. make a multilevel pure css combination drop down/fly-out menu that works in IE5.5 up. Its less intuitive than programming in brainfuck. Other people's perl will give it a run for its money though.
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Of course, most of us barely bother to support IE6 (and that's mostly a "well, let's make sure they can at least view the site" effort) because pretty much any browsers of that era had serious issues with rendering anything properly.
At work I'm in charge of a website which has a 500+ line file called "ie6screen.css", the entire purpose of this file is to make IE6 behave somewhat properly. And this isn't even counting all the CSS in the regular stylesheets (for all browsers) that's been tweaked and messed wi
Re:Only 24 hours? (Score:4, Insightful)
quote: For example, CSS doesn't have variables... so you can't say something like "headerColor = #5444BB" and just use that wherever you want the header color. What were they thinking!?
That's what css classes are for: .blueHeader { color: #5444BB; } .redHeader { color: #BB4445; }
CSS -
HTML -
I'm Blue
I'm Red
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Ok, let's say classes solve all problems with color duplication. Wouldn't the CSS be a heck of a lot easier to read if your #5444BB had a more friendly name? Maybe you're an expert at looking at hex colors and instantly figuring out what they look like, but I sure as hell ain't. There's more than one advantage to having variables.
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That doesn't make any sense. You still have to assign the value to the variable.
Well, obviously.
The value is going to be a hex number. You don't have to use hex colors, if you want to limit yourself to the color names that css recognizes,
Again, duh. The problem is that nobody uses the built-in colors. (Which is just as well, since only like 8 of them are defined in the standard-- the rest Microsoft put in IE, and other browsers just kind of ran with IE's color list.)
In the end, you are communicating with a
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One way or another, you're going to have to define the color in hex mode.
Duh. Stop repeating that, I'm not a retard, and I'm not saying otherwise.
What I'm saying is that in a single CSS file, you should only see a particular hex color *once*. *Ever.* And that one time? You should be assigning it to a friendly human-readable name. A well-designed language would allow this, CSS doesn't.
In my job, I see tons of CSS files from tons of different web designers. Almost in all cases, the same hex color is seen 3, 4
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They may be how they are used, but that's not how they were meant to be used, the idea being that CSS classes mark content, while CSS deals with presentation. Classes as "blueHeader" are no better than a <font> tag; things get interesting when you want to make all the "blueHeader" content red, for example.
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Look, forget classes. I think you bringing up classes has clouded the issue. I'm saying I should be able to write a CSS file like this (syntax pulled out my ass):
See? Now the mysterious hex value have a friendly, human-readable, name. Now I can change it in 4 places by chang
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Because CSS is not a programming language. If you want, you can easily have the programming language of your choice generate CSS. You can also use multiple classes on any html element. You can use Javascript libraries to avoid those problems as well.
I'm not saying that CSS is perfect, or even great, because it isn't. But it is not intended to be a programming language, and you are basically complaining that it doesn't have the features of a programming language.
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But it is not intended to be a programming language, and you are basically complaining that it doesn't have the features of a programming language.
I'm not asking for LOOPS, or decision-making, or Turing-completeness, I'm just asking for a way to assign a friendly name to a value. That's not too much to ask, and tons of non-programming languages have that. (Although, I guess, HTML isn't one of them.)
And yah, you can generate your CSS from another file, but that's a complete pain in the ass. Why should you ha
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The rest I leave up to Blueprint CSS.
I looked into Blueprint, it appears to have absolutely nothing for fluid layouts. If you design websites to a static size, I guess it's helpful, but I like things to flow-- otherwise I might as well put up a damned PDF file instead.
Now if you want to see me get pissed off, we can talk about how the browsers implement the standards.
Considering the standards are such shit, I give browsers a lot more benefit of the doubt. :)
For example, it's hard to get upset at IE for usin
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The current hotspot is now having a footer at the bottom which:
-Floats at the bottom of the page, regardless of how little content there is
-Expands down the page when content overflows, so it doesn't cover content.
-Reacts when you do things like hide/show content.
So many different ways to do it, all with little quirks. Bottom line, CSS is designed as a system of browser HINTS which the browser uses to determine how content is laid out when the window changes size/shape. It has some hacks for specifying sp
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Re:Only 24 hours? (Score:5, Informative)
You young folk don't know how good you've got it. I cut my teeth doing all-nighters at the campus computer center, that being the only way to get decent turnaround on the 360 mainframe. (Don't know what I'm talking about? Google "batch processing" and "IBM cards".) With that training, I was able to pull all-nighters well into my 40s. Though it wasn't nearly as much fun by then — everybody else was gone by 6, the wimps.
The w3schools.com is very impressive. Not only do they provide a huge amount of well-written content, they have these cool web apps that let you fiddle with code and see the results immediately. I've never worked through any of their tutorials, but when I google for information on some HTML or CSS feature, I end up on w3schools.com about 75% of the time. That should tell you something.
W3.org is also a valuable resource. They are, after all, the authoritative source for HTML, CSS, and lots of other web technologies. Two pitfalls: their target audience is implementers and standards wonks, not web developers; and you have to watch out for features that never got implemented.
Despite these issues, it's really a good idea to write web code that targets the W3C specs rather than specific browsers. That way you'll have web pages that work on most browsers and don't break whenever somebody tinkers with Gecko or Trident.
Misinfromation in 1st Chapter (Score:5, Informative)
I found this while previewing the book on Amazon's website: "Suppose you want to do a Google search, so you dutifully type http://www.google.com in the address bar"..."Your web browser sends a request for the index.html file located at the http://www.google.com/ address"
While it's not the end of the world, it certainly is an error that will misguide a beginner on how traffic is exchanged between a browsing client and the web server. The web browser does not assume index.html. That is the job of the web server to assign a default document whether its index.html, default.htm, index.php, or yourmama.html.
Re:Misinfromation in 1st Chapter (Score:5, Informative)
That is the job of the web server to assign a default document whether its index.html, default.htm, index.php, or yourmama.html
I sent a request for yourmama.html last night, and it was 200 OK.
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Re:Misinfromation in 1st Chapter (Score:5, Informative)
+1 funny mods don't give karma points to the author. To work around this, the moderators decide to
- mod moderately funny jokes as funny
- mod great jokes as informative or insightful
The practice is widespread and metamods generally agree with it (I think, at least I still get mod points...).
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I would have gone with "402 Payment Required"
Re:Misinfromation in 1st Chapter (Score:5, Funny)
I can't reproduce that. I keep getting 413 Request Entity Too Large instead.
X in 24 hours (Score:5, Informative)
Doesn't everyone know that X in 24 hours books neither teach you X, nor do it in 24 hours? They're super low-end guides generally that contain outdated information that could just as easily have been gleaned from tutorials. Meh.
I can't believe Slashdot ran an ad^H^H^H^H review of this book.
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Kindof like the for dummies books? Well, except I have found quite a few "for dummies" books that have been extraordinarily helpful. I have a "Learn C in 24 hours' by Jesse Liberty that I bought many years ago. This is the kind of book that is routinely derided by those knowledgable in the subject. And yet, it was enough to get me started, and enough to get me to the right forums to learn the right way of doing things. I am forever grateful that I picked up that book at a bookstore and it got me further do
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I have to agree with you. I don't get the hostility toward "Teach yourself X" books. They're a great place to start.
Granted, there are a number of crappy ones out there, but a lot of them are great as intro tutorials (and some even serve well as refs)
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I hadn't realized that *literally* judging a book by its cover gets you moderated 'Informative'. It will be interesting to see how the parent rates versus postings that actually address the content of the book.
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Ha! I learned C++ in 24 hours and now I write security sensitive applications!
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They're super low-end guides generally that contain outdated information that could just as easily have been gleaned from tutorials.
Don't think of it as Sams being slow. Think of them as giving Internet Explorer a chance to at least partially support CSS before the book ships.
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The 24 hours thing is just a gimmick. Like O'Reilly books, the quality depends on the author. I've used these Teach Yourself books in the past to come to speed quickly on various topics and generally they work well for that. Yeah, some really suck. And none are designed to be a comprehensive education, but for some quick cramming, they work fine.
Why XHTML? (Score:3)
A case against XHTML [hixie.ch]
Not only is it possibly harmful to send XHTML (xml) as text/html, all your style and script blocks need to be wrapped in all kinds of comment / (P)CDATA silliness to truly validate correctly, etc. Read the article and you may decide that HTML 4 (strict) is the way to go.
On the other hand, if someone would like to refute the points in the link above, I'd welcome an alternate perspective.
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The only reason we send XHTML as text/html at all is because a certain browser doesn't understand application/xml+xhtml and some turnkey firewall boxes insist on every application/whatever MIME-type being "teh ewul exxxe filez of pr0n and virooseses!!1".
As for XHTML being stricter than HTML 4, that's a good thing IMO.
/Mikael
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The only reason we send XHTML as text/html at all is because a certain browser doesn't understand application/xml+xhtml
..although I believe Firefox will not try to render a document served as application/xml+xhtml *until* the entire thing has loaded. That said, I can understand why it would do that if it was just "application/xml" but I would've though the +xhtml bit should trigger it to be a bit smarter! so maybe this is just a Firefox issue. And also... this is something I vaguely remember reading, so I might be talking crap and/or it might've changed in recent releases!
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The big problem with XHTML is that the W3C was wasting their time with this format that offers dubious benefit, made browsers more complicated, on the assumption that older versions of HTML would just... I dunno... magically go away. (At which point, browsers could be made simpler again.) Oh, and of course they didn't bother to figure out what actual websites on the actual Internet need, so it's incompatible with a ton of hugely popular tags. (For example, Atlas Universal Action Tags don't validate in XHTML
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Yes... I could have my server serve up HTML to browsers *and* provide an API that serves XML, and t
"Sams" is All I Needed to Know (Score:3, Interesting)
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Seriously. Any book whose title neglects the apostrophe to denote possessive case can't be very reliable. And Sam doesn't even have any qualifications!
Straight? (Score:2)
Or am I supposed to take breaks (meaning it will actually take more than 24 hours ;^)?
perhaps for aspiring web _developers_ (Score:1, Insightful)
Web design is wholly different than HTML + CSS development.
Julie C. Meloni-Department of English-Wash. St. (Score:1, Informative)
Meloni is an English teacher!
Two minor corrections... (Score:3, Informative)
1999 called ... (Score:2)
When HTML 5 is out (Score:2)
I have been reading the HTML 5 discussion docs at WHATWG [whatwg.org]
Here is one DOM of one element:
interface HTMLDataListElement : HTMLElement {
readonly attribute HTMLCollection options;
};
"Teach yourself a half dozen HTML5 Elements in 24 hours - Part 1 of 50/Series 1 of 200)"
Teach yourself anything (well) in 10 years (Score:1)
Accessibility? No? Didn't think so... (Score:2)
Re:would be nice if .... (Score:4, Interesting)
In defense of HTML and CSS, MySpace was not really what I'd imagine the web would look like. MySpace only lets you insert HTML and CSS via what is essentially an injection attack. Tumblr let's you rewrite the entire page and I see plenty of tumblr blogs that look just fine.
Re:Why type? (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean, Please! This is the 21st century wtf are we still typing for christ-sakes?!
This is why. [little-gamers.com]
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Does anyone still type in HTML or CSS anymore? Don't you just bring up a WSYWIG designer and just publish your page? I mean, Please! This is the 21st century wtf are we still typing for christ-sakes?! This is why. [little-gamers.com]
Dreamweaver is more aptly called nightmare weaver. Quick and dirty one up static page? Sure use WYSIWYG. Editing something existing with well thought out hand written CSS? Forget it, you are just going to screw things up.
Of course static hand created webpages in this day are the real WTF. For anything more complicated than a few pages it makes a lot more sense to run a CMS. Design the template once properly so it looks correct on the major browsers and let users change the content via the CMS. No luser sh
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You're missing your opening paragraph tag.
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I certainly don't do html hard coding anymore, but back in the day when I was in middle school ('95-'98) learning HTML from a couple of books, I did everything in notepad. There is no way I would hard-code an entire website nowadays, but I'm glad I started with the straight coding...it has made learning PHP MUCH easier.
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If you to be one of those persons who use WYSIWYG editors to carve your HTML/CSS then in order to find out why you shouldn't use one of those then simply pick up any document you've created with your editor of choice and open it with a text editor. The amount of useless cruft that it creates will blow your mind. And more to the point, if you don't know HTML and/or CSS and rely on a WYSIWYG tool then no matter how pretty your doc appears to be, you still don't have a clue about what you are doing. And tha