I picked this one up as schwag at a conference I attended/spoke at; I was pretty clearly not the audience for this book but at the same time: hey, freI picked this one up as schwag at a conference I attended/spoke at; I was pretty clearly not the audience for this book but at the same time: hey, free book. It's definitely for "absolute beginners" re "programming" [1] for the web with HTML and CSS. Which isn't to say that it isn't without its merits. On the plus side, Robson et al. introduce the box model and doctypes and selector inheritance and a bunch of other concepts that a lot of self-taught early stage web developers don't learn about until it's almost too late. On the not-so-plus side, they make liberal use of IDs for their CSS selector examples (without explaining why you generally shouldn't use them) and are a little inconsistent in the kinds of warnings they give w/r/t/ things like browser compatibility. [2] Nevertheless, I wish that I'd had this book for when I was learning all of this stuff, instead of trying to wade through Goodman... and Meyer... and Flanagan. One book with a solid foundation on the fundamentals of page flow, selectors and inheritance, positioning, etc. [3]
That being said, please don't fool yourself into thinking that you're a "web developer" when you finish this book. You'll be able to bang together some halfway decent static pages--and maybe that's totally sufficient for your needs. But this is really just a 101 course [4] in everything else that comes with the territory of being a front-end developer.
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[1] I use "programming" in quotes here because, as any professional web developer knows, . More/less the same goes for styling with CSS. Which isn't to say that there's nothing to learn, or that there aren't difficult parts, just... get back to me after you've finished coaxing something out of O(n^2).
[2] For example: there's a multi-page treatment of the video tag and all the complications that you might face, and there are some warnings in there about "older IE" (e.g., how it doesn't handle certain text scalings in predictable ways) -- but I don't recall seeing warnings about how IE flubs the box model (esp. in quirks mode), nor how display tables aren't supported in "older IE" either.
[3] Again: not that it isn't missing some nuance etc. But it's a good place to start.
[4] And even then, it's more like... the reading you should have done in high school before getting to the 101 course? The summer selections that you need to have done before the first day of class? Something along those lines....more
Short version: SMACSS isn't a downloadable framework; it's a CSS design philosophy: "Design for the system, not the site." Snook delivers some great aShort version: SMACSS isn't a downloadable framework; it's a CSS design philosophy: "Design for the system, not the site." Snook delivers some great advice on how to construct your project's CSS--much of that advice being compatible with and reminiscent of Nicole Sullivan's OOCSS proposals--but it's the kind of thing that requires you to change the way that you think. You need to be focused and disciplined. It's a philosophy worth learning, and these are rules worth applying--but make no mistake: this isn't an easy drop-in solution.
Disclosure: I read the online version, and did not read the "Premium Content" chapters. That said, I was lucky enough to see Snook's talk during the 2012 E4H "CSS Summit". (So I think I got the message...)...more
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