Web Designer's Reference
friends of ED, December 2004
This is my second collaboration with Craig Grannell, this time as technical editor (previously we were co-authors of Foundation Dreamweaver MX 2004). Craig is a talented web designer, who is passionate about web standards, and in my opinion, he's put together a very practical and readable guide. As the book's subtitle says, it's "an integrated approach to web design with XHTML and CSS".
Although the title makes it sound dry and academic, nothing could be further from the truth. It's a practical, hands-on book about building stylish web pages with CSS. There are chapters devoted to text, navigation, tables, and the CSS box model. But it's not just about CSS. Craig covers all the essentials for working with web pages. He hates frames, but acknowledges that they can be useful in the right context, and devotes a chapter to highlighting the pitfalls and how to avoid them. There are also chapters on choosing the best HTML and image editors, and a brief chapter on multimedia.
As technical editor, it was my job to test all the code to make sure that it worked. It does. What I liked particularly about Craig's approach is that he doesn't simply give you the CSS style rules for a drop cap and leave it at that; he shows you step-by-step what each rule is doing. Consequently, you end up not only knowing how to create a nice text effect, but also understand how the rules interact with each other. He takes the same approach with pull quotes, navigation, and restyling the same content in different ways.
My other role as technical editor was to make sure that Craig had got his facts right, and that everything was up to date with the latest versions of the W3C standards. Where there was any doubt, we pored over the specifications (not the most user-friendly of documents) until we were satisfied. The result is an accurate and user-friendly guide to all aspects of web page design that should appeal to beginner and expert alike.