Designing With Web Standards

Rating:
Summary: Good book but...
Review: Dan Cederholm's book had 2x more information and examples and was 2x thinner.
J. Zeldman's book is a basic introduction to CSS, but is quite good for XHTML, Accessibility, and standards in general. This book is general purpose. It's a lot of blablabla and jokes too, and sometimes distracts the reader from what she should stay focused on. It shouldn't be your 1st book or you might get lost at times. The few examples are interesting. Zeldman should release a 2nd edition without all the talking about his own life and sarcastic stories, but with all examples from A List Apart. It would be very interesting. Ok, buy it if you already read the masterpieces of webdesign like Dan Cederholm and Eric Meyer :)

Rating:
Summary: good work and ideas
Review: I spent a long time flipping between CSS/web standards books before deciding on Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman. I enjoyed the book but found it 'in-between'. It was part 'how-to' and part 'practical'. The challenge for me was the how-to section was often the simple stuff and the practical part was very specific examples he used for client work. The examples are helpful but are unique situations to his work.

Overall I enjoyed the book. There are some cool ideas, helpful insight, gee-whiz factor in what he is doing that everyone will benefit. I think it lays out the problems, challenges and frustrations [the first four chapters only deal with spelling out the problems] that people face trying to 'design with web standards'. The questions for you are (1) do you want to see this spelled out for you? And (2) do you enjoy books that show practical examples that show how one person used some cool ideas to get around the problems? These are the $23.80 questions.

Rating:
Summary: Great book....can the humor
Review: I dont know about how you feel about dry humor and sarcasm, but, when reading a "how to" book, I dont need it. This is a great resource BUT, Zeldman tries a little too hard to be funny. Word of advice, skip pages and read the meat of the book.

It was a chore reading this book.......

Rating:
Summary: Simply the best guide to CSS and Standards!
Review: Breath of fresh air among all technical books. I read it twice in 2 weeks.
Best content for pure and standard oriented CSS deelopment!! very useful
Already helped so much to develop our e-commerce web site without tables and a very few javascript.. consider a menu without images and javascript!!
Clean style with a high quality book - reflection of its content - nothing like that in the market.

Thanks for writing such a book - impressive style in the book and your website.

BK

Rating:
Summary: An eye opener
Review: I should by rights be giving this book 3 stars, but Zeldman's writing style earns it that 4th one.
The reviews here are split between those who cannot heap enough praise on this book and those who reject it as so much self-promoting pop.
I'm somewhere in between. Let's start with the reasons why you might NOT want to buy this book: Mr. Zeldman repeats his message over and over again in the book's first 140 pages. You ARE left with the feeling that the first part could have been less than half as long and still have managed to get the message across just fine. Together with the many paragraph headings and the relative low word-count per page, I tend to see the hand of Mr. Zeldman's editors urging him to increase the page count so the price could be set equally high. And yes, that is another reason why you might want to pass on this book. It is, I feel, unresonably highly priced, particularly for a book containing this little substance.
But read on, because there are equally good reasons why you might want to consider purchasing this book. The thing is, that the things Mr. Zeldman DOES cover, he covers very well. His little nuggets regarding workarounds for browser(in)compatibilities, his thoughtful chapter on designing for accessability for people of various degrees of disability, and his two real-world examples of modern web-(re)design makes it worth the repetitious style. In my opinion, the fact that Mr. Zeldman does not evangilize beyond the basic tenet that the time has come for designers to follow the modern browsers in using the standards he describes, makes him worth my time. His thoughtful explanations on redesigning existing sites without dogmatic adherence to 100% pure standard might prove worth more than the (relatively high) cost of this book.
If you know enough HTML to author and debug a functional site using tables, this is a book for you.
If you are a spare-time web designer, the first (repetitive) half of this book will give you many good arguments to use with your customers that will make you look like you really know you're doing (it's then up to you to deliver, of course).
I didn't care much for most of Mr. Zeldman's attempt at humor (except on p.158), but he does possess a gift for writing entertainingly yet remain informative.
I highly recommend you to read this book.

Rating:
Summary: Easy Kudos
Review: It is easy to award maximum kudos to Jeffrey Zeldman for his writing of this book. Not only extremely informative, the book is thoroughly enjoyable to read. Mr. Zeldman could have a second career as a comedian. He manages to teach and inform while at the same time making you smile (and sometimes laugh out loud). The book is well suited for those with at least a rudimenary knowledge of CSS and HTML. Nobody with a desire to add to their web designing skill sets should be disappointed with this book. Mr. Zeldman is one of the leading forces behind the use of web standards and, as such, highly informed and authoritative. Highest possible marks for this book!!

Rating:
Summary: A nice addition to Eric Meyer's O'Reilly CSS book
Review: Let me first say that I'm not really a fan of the author's personality, being a regular reader of his website, http://www.alistapart.com (an amazing resource for CSS-based design). In fact, I had been purposely avoiding this book because out of all the writers on the site, he seems to be the biggest zealot for completely CSS-based design. I have always kept up on CSS for text and layouts but didn't really consider it viable until just within the last year or so, with Mozilla's browser family and Apple's Safari browser both doing tremendous jobs of actually rendering. Having said all that, a coworker of mine bought the book today and I read about 2/3 of it. I have to say I was impressed with the breadth of knowledge that the author displays, but more importantly, he is able to convey that knowledge into simple terms for non-geeks to understand. I think this book is a great stepping stone up from Eric Meyer's CSS book from O'Reilly (I have the first printing, a newer printing might be more updated). Zeldman breaks down DTDs, why to use them, when to use them, how to use them. He details how to build CSS-and-table designs, CSS-only designs, and all the nitty-gritty details in between. He talks about quirks in different browsers and how to code for them with graceful degredation in older browsers. This is a very informative book and converted a person who intentionally avoided it until now.