Bulletproof Web Design

I first got introduced to Dan Cederholm's writing by buying his "Web Standards Solutions" book. I only had to read a couple of pages and I was hooked. It is one of my all-time favourite web design books. Clearly showing you how to create useful web standard driven CSS. So when I first heard about "Bulletproof Web Design" from Dan's excellent SimpleBits site. I couldn't wait to get my paws on it.

Bulletproof CSS

I am slowly learning new CSS tricks and techniques and this book is already part of my armoury for building fast-loading, easy to maintain web sites using web standards. If you do not know what web standards are, buy a copy of "Designing with Web Standards" by Jeffrey Zeldman. If you are already up to speed, then this book may be of interest. It is a full colour book, containing 270 pages of tried and tested CSS and markup techniques.

A slow start

Chapter 1 deals with sizing text with keywords and percentages. It was a little dull, but extremely useful. As Dan points out in the chapter's conclusion. "And here's some good news: this initial chapter is probably the least interesting of the entire book but very necessary in order to set a solid - no, flexible - foundation for the examples that follow." Ok it maybe a little dull, but for me the examples in this first chapter justify the cost of the book alone.

Flexible web design techniques

Through the use of glorious colour. Dan walks you through scalable navigation, Expandable Rows, Creative Floating, Indestructible Boxes, No-image browsing, Convertible Tables, Fluid Layouts and the last chapter puts it all together to build a flexible, bulletproof design. This is a very practical book, demonstrating real-world supple techniques that will encourage you to develop flexible and bulletproof web designs. Each chapter starts with "A Common Approach" - showing how a particular technique may have been done prior to this book and builds to show you a better, more elastic CSS techniques that are better semantically and for the users that browse your websites.

Buy Bulletproof Web Design from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk