Everything You Know About CSS Is Wrong!

I don’t know how Sitepoint knew it, but they are right, I suck at CSS! Luckily I came across this book and all that is going to change.

Sitepoint authors Rachel Andrew and Kevin Yank to you through a few of the new abilities of CSS in the coming browsers. They discuss CSS tables, and layout for pretty much the whole book.

Jokingly you could really call this book “Everything you want to know about CSS tables” as the main of the 5 chapters is solely about the topic of creating and understanding CSS tables. The remainder of the book seemed to be some good Microsoft bashing referring to IE6,7 and 8.

The book was short, and a quick read. Weighing in at roughly 111 pages, and only 5 chapters, it is an easy weekend, or one night read. 

The majority of the CSS tactics they cover (CSS Tables) will work in current browsers with the exception of the Microsoft browsers. They base alot of the information on the idea that IE8 will be coming soon, and as you can download the beta now it is worth trying out the code shown in this book and seeing what we can do in the near future when users finally get their browsers up to date.

As always you can pick up this book at Sitepoint’s website or at Amazon.com

Beginning Silverlight 2: From Novice to Professional

In web development, it’s important to keep current on new and updated technologies to avoid falling behind in the field. As a designer-turned-coder, I enjoy reading about and following up on the latest tools available for design and interface programming. Having designed and programmed in Flash for almost 10 years now, I was excited to read this book and see how Microsoft was tackling Rich Internet/Interactive Applications.

The author, Robert Lair, starts out the book with an introduction to Silverlight and the benefits of building interactive applications using Silverlight and its related tools. After the brief introduction, the real work begins and the reader is quickly involved in writing Silverlight applications. Robert does a great job walking the reader through the various tools available while building each application, and each example builds on or incorporates the previous examples, effectively ‘stair-stepping’ the reader up to building their own Silverlight applications. Read more