HTML & CSS – Book Review

Ever since I saw this book mentioned in Issue 23 of the HTML5 Weekly newsletter, and the internal glimpse that the book’s website gave, I eagerly awaited its arrival.

I wasn’t disappointed.

This book is a beauty to behold. It laughs in the face of convention when it comes to technical books, using a number of different methods to engage the reader, displaying information in new and different ways with beautiful images, photographs, typography and layout. Author Jon Duckett was given full reign not only on what the book would contain, but also on how it looks internally. The results speak for themselves.

The aim of this book is to introduce and teach someone, new to web development and design, all about HTML and CSS. As such, as a professional web developer myself, most of the content of this book was familiar to me (except the introduction of the rem unit and HSL colour definitions in CSS3). But that didn’t matter. The book itself is still a joy to flick through, and what it didn’t (need to) teach me about HTML and CSS, it did about keeping a reader interested.

The book itself goes through many of the commonly used HTML elements, explaining, with full examples (which are also available on the accompanying website), what they do and how they are used. Old practices such as using <font> are mentioned, so that readers are aware of it’s existence when reading the code of older pages on the web, but their usage now is correctly advised against. Where HTML5 has introduced something new and relevant, this is also mentioned in the appropriate place.

The same approach is taken with CSS, with many of the most popular rules and definitions introduced and explained, with the new features of CSS3 talked about where relevant.

Full examples are given and described at the end of chapters and sometimes before, providing “look how they’re used” samples of everything that was just spoken about.

The last few chapters on the book also provide a useful introduction on basic web design, talking about such things as understanding users’ needs and wireframes. Practical information is also provided on basic SEO and using tools such as Google Analytics to understand what the visitors to a site are doing. In addition, there’s a small section devoted to domain names and actually getting your files onto the web, all useful information for someone starting out in the world of web development and design.

Even the indices have some thought put into them. As well as a standard index, there is a troubleshooting section with common errors, and indices for individual HTML elements and attributes, as well as the CSS properties and pseudo classes.

But throughout the book, the images, typography, colour and way the information is presented to readers is aesthetically pleasing. From the bold and huge lettering when introducing new things such as HTML tags (p.23 and 24) to the numerous full page photographs of sample webpages on an array of different devices and backgrounds, it’s delightful to look at.

All in all this is a pearl of a book, and even if you think you know everything there is to know about HTML and CSS, buy this book anyway as it’s a joy to read.

Kroc Camen says that “code is art”. This book proves it.