Style Sheets Books

didn't byron have a co-author to this book? What happend to _his_ name

(This review refers to the book which contains three of Hoffman's many tales.) If you enjoy European fantasy, Hoffman invites you to enter his dark realm where the distinctions between the Real and the Impossible are blurred. Allow yourself to be lead into a parallel universe, where nightmares take on frightenting intensity; where the solid world melts into obsessions, doppelgangers and the scent of brimstone. Where men sell their souls (or their reflections) for passion, fame or talent. Such is the literary milieu created by ETA Hoffman, which inspired Jacques Offenback to compose an opera on three of these chiaroscuro vignettes.

Each tale features a different protagonist--a passionate but morbid young man ensnared by insidious evil or a warped mindset. Still we empathize their their various predicaments as they inevitably fall prey to the schemes of devious men, or even worse--their own propensity for paranoia. It is left to the reader to judge each case for himself. Certain elements are common to all three tales; the importance of Music, superfluous references to artists, scientists and writers of the day, and the quaint contrivance of protecting the identity of the cities by merely giving their first initial. Hoffman's themes are depressing but fascinating; so often the love of good women can not avail the heroes, who simply refuse salvation. Permit the mists of confusion and tempatation to swirl through your brain until you are gradually released from your stifling bondage to the
Normal with its limitations of the senses. Surrender to the dark side--from the safety of your armchair!

This is absolutely the worst book I have ever attempted to read. I agree with the other reviewers' remarks concerning the author's cutesy feeble attempts at humor. More irritating, however, is his failure to describe adequately the topics on which he touches, and the organization of the book is poor. He tells you part of something in one chapter, and maybe another part of it in another chapter - or not at all. When you apply the instructions he provides, the result often doesn't work, and there is nothing in the book to help you figure out why.

Most of the section headings are extremely stupid puns. Now, I have nothing against puns, mind you, but there is an enormous difference between a smart pun and a stupid one. Damon Dean must not be able to get the smart ones. Yet from a navigational standpoint, using puns in headings is really stupid. The headings are what a reader relies on to locate a topic. Any competent writer knows that. When puns are used in the headings, the reader is at a real loss about the subsumed topic, which completely defeats the purpose of the headings in the first place.

The old adage "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with B. S." no doubt applies here. Generally when a speaker or writer succeeds only in confusing the audience, it's because he doesn't know what he's talking about. I would venture to say that that is the case with Damon Dean.

If this were the only book a person had for learning how to use cascading style sheets, he would give up on the subject altogether before he got halfway through. I, for one, will never waste my money on a "For Dummies" book again!

The writing in this book is muddy, and like another reviewer here, I had to buy a second book to figure out what this book was saying. Since Dummies books are for beginners, a logical order running from easy to difficult should be used. This author is all over the place.

The above is bad enough, then add to this the obvious fact that the book was merely spell-checked but never looked at by an editor (or at least by one who knows grammar and syntax).

The code isn't consistent, and the index has errors.

Don't buy this book. It was obviously pushed out the publisher's door without any attempt to make sure customers get their money's worth. Don't you get ripped off too.

Full of errors and mistakes -- not only this, but the author is impossible to follow. Had to buy another book on the topic. Stay away.

While it's true that the Dummies series are supposed to provide a way for the less-proficient to easily get their feet wet, this installment is so annoyingly scripted as to be headache-inducing. The author attempts to lighten the load by injecting humor into the book. But the jokes are bad and they mostly just clutter the author's run-on sentences. The text is so cutesy at times I found myself actually getting fatigued reading it. This book could be simplified and probably cut down by 50 pages if the author would dispense with the "funny" interjections and just focus on the topic.

Of course, it's just a beginner's guide, so the book serves no practical reference purpose after you get through it.

The author mingles in many personal remarks which clutters the content substantially, making for a difficult, annoying read. After finding another introductory & intermediate CSS book, & then comparing the two, I can honestly say CSS For Dummies is not organized well, has examples which do not contain vital information or a variety of applications. Based on other books I've owned & read, this book is a poor choice when learning CSS.

Worst of all, there was at least one sample file on the included CD where illegal [chemical] use was cited in the text (see Ch8_fixed.html on the CD - the author writes about "being pissed", and taking [a chemical]). Examples as this clearly make the book an undesirable selection - especially for youth trying to learn CSS. There are simply no reasons for either using offensive language or blatant references to illegal [chemical] use in a book like this.

I'll never buy another "Dummies" book again.

The CD requires an installation to print.
The installation then requires a registration.
The regular registration doesn't work even though the software says it was successful.
Next you can go to the next level and do "online" registration which doesn't work either even though once again the software says it was successful.
Contacted (emailed) customer support. No reply.
This is nonfunctioning crap without support!!

This is so helpful in making sure the notes you play aren't off and what the song is supposed to sound like for songs you haven't heard a thousand times. Very good product for beginner guitar players.

This CD requires the installation of a plug-in for your browser. Then you get to see music that's too small to read, not to mention it's very hard to read on a computer monitor anyway. You can print a copy but must be online AND you only get to print it once! Make sure your printer does not jam!!! When the music is displayed via your browser you can 'play' it but what you hear are synthesized tones. It contains simple, easy to play melodies that sound somewhat like the song, but are not at all true to the music. This CD (book) is a BIG DISAPPOINTMENT, as I have many other books by Hal Leonard, which are excellent. You probably don't want this CD.

This book has a lot of great broadway music in it. The music is easy to sight read and it really has the best of Broadway within it's pages.

If you want to get a compilation of songs that are wellknown and a bit over done... this is the book for you. However, the songs are not in their original keys, and are not suitable for most formal auditions. futher more, the song selections are not unique... and to find a unique song this book does you no good.
DONT BUY THIS BOOK. Everyone has it, and the songs in it are not good.

With the introduction of the Microsoft and Netscape 4.0 series Web browsers new and exciting Web development design options have arrived on the scene. Touted as a method of quickly designing and updating HTML documents, Style Sheets programming promises an easier and quicker way to produce cutting-edge results!

The authors demonstrate throughout this book some really innovative approaches to designing Websites. Readers will learn how to creatively add color to their Web pages, how to set margins as never before, how to prescisely control element positioning. how to indent text, how to manage font properties, and more. Readers will learn how to graduate from basic HTML to this higher level of programming challenge! Actual Websites and sample Web pages are provided to demonstrate this latest concept in Web design.

The book features plenty of sample exercises readers can work through. They provide a variety of layout options and illustrations of style and structure. The CD that accompanies the book is loaded with all of the sample style sheets source code from the book as well as software programs allowing immediate implementation of Style Sheets programming.

Coriolis rates this book for intermediate through advanced users. I concur. Beginners will have a difficult finding their way through this book but the rewards can be great for those who can master this Web development programming tool!

Don't be seduced by this book's lavish cover or large-format, its 60-page color section or the considerable writing experience of the three authors. This book's potentially timely and valuable information is crippled by the publisher's decision to get this book on the shelves without benefit of the least editorial proofing.

Page after page of obvious problems completely undermine your confidence in the technical content. Statements like "The Times font is probably the most commonly used font written in languages using Arabic letters." (p114) surely won't convince you that the authors have something to teach you in the way of fontfaces.

Poorly thought-out and unimaginative illustrations have only a tenuous relation to text. Sometimes they have no relation. On p105, the authors "illustrate" the block nature of a list-item with a picture of Felix the Cat in a non-browser window labelled "Animated Gifs". Another example shows us Lotus Notes instead of Netscape.

It is clear that technical facts have not been thoroughly checked. This is very important in an area where published standards are not completely implemented and there are wide variations in the type of implementation across browsers and platforms. We are told that "font size (sic) and font weight (tsk tsk) are abbreviated using the slash (12pt/14pt)." No, font-size and line-height are abbreviated that way.

The book is poorly indexed, but that is normal for computer books. What is abnormal is that the color section, about one-third of the book, has not been indexed at all! Especially amusing was the 5 full-color pages gushing about Time Magazine's exemplary use of style sheets *without one line* of code to back up the authors' esteem.

No, this is one beautiful book best admired from afar.

This was the first "Dummies" book I ever bought and is likely the last. The author has a clear bias against internet standards and is prone to go off on rants about committees and their supposedly bad decisions that make life hard for him. If he had simply stated his positions at the beginning of the book, it would have been fine, but the continual diatribes, many of which are ill-conceived and/or illogical, throughout the book are distracting.

Don't buy this book. Get the O'Reilly book on CSS. It is much more helpful and doesn't have any of Mansfield's bias.

I actually took the time to find this title on Amazon just to write a review (and hopefully save people money).

I'm not a professional designer, I'm not even a very good hobbyist designer.
I only know what I need to know to get the result I want on the page.
So I figured it might be time to actually understand what I'm doing and not copy and alter existing code, and this is the first book on CSS I read.
And it was not at all helpful.
I learned a lot more from occasionally googling to an online free tutorial, and looking at the source code of free CSS templates that I liked.

This book is a very basic intro into CSS, pretty much only targeted to IE users (because, who uses anything else, right?! *hmpf!*) and I really struggle to try and find something nice to say about it after plowing through it all for 4 hours.

And if you're using Dreamweaver this whole book can be summarized in 5 pages
(or heck, let me try 1 line: open the CSS Rule definition box, adjust the value, and see what it does).

This book did not explain things clearly, and there was a lot of useless information to sift through.
For example: who on earth would want to use those very very ugly default image borders/bullets/horizontal lines in the first place (and the book says nothing at all about customizing those, which I think should be possible with CSS?? )

Also I really want to mention the website layout/design samples in the book,
text over a too busy background so that it becomes very hard to read: Bad!!

So, in short, stay away from this one, even if you can get it for free you're wasting your time.

This book may have been useful in a IE6-only world. However, since the world has moved on, a book dedicated to CSS-for-IE6 is now outdated, at best. While I appreciate that he is writing from an IE-centric viewpoint and am OK with skipping functions IE doesn't recognize, including ActiveX in an introductory CSS book (in the beginning chapters, even) is simply misguided. Sure, you can fade your text ... if your viewer is willing to accept the ActiveX warnings.

Further, the author takes the Dummies "casual" approach (which I generally do not mind) beyond the level of good taste. He spends far too much time insulting the creators of CSS (among others), expects me to admire his inability to understand concepts, and actually crosses into condescending far too often. Here's a choice example: "Don't worry about why you use the (0). It's a quirk of computer languages that makes no sense - they start counting up from zero rather than one. Just use the code and don't bother your pretty head about it." (You have the opportunity to be told not to worry your "pretty head" about things more than once. Brilliant.)

Arrogance is one thing, but when there are as many sloppy errors in code and concept as there are here it becomes almost laughable. I can accept the occasional grammar or formatting error, but the code should be checked more thoroughly -- sometimes an error is repeated over and over. For examples, on several occasions he uses equal signs instead of colons, which might leave the beginner wondering a bit why the code misfires, and his demonstration of the nth-child selector is simply incorrect.

I can't say there's nothing to be learned from this book, and it has the makings of being a decent introduction to CSS. Some of his comments on style and avoiding tacky design may be helpful and he does a decent job of avoiding being too technical. However, I'm really glad I made use of the library for this one, and whoever checks it out after me will be glad of the corrections I've left behind.

It has some interesting examples, but it got into unnecessary explanation of the thousands of ways to address a tag, a bit annoying. Then I got to page 91, where the author tries to explain the difference between "relative" and "absolute" positioning of elements. Here I encountered one of my biggest pet peeves. I will let you read it yourself:
"Of course, as Albert Einstein pointed out, everything is relative except the
speed of light. So, when we speak of "absolute" positioning, it merely means
that we're being somewhat "less relative." What do I mean by this?
You actually cannot sit still, no matter how hard you try. When you think you're
sitting still, you're still moving at about a half million miles per hour as the solar
system spins around the galaxy. In fact, you're moving through space in a rapid
and complex corkscrew path. Even while you're quietly asleep, you're still flying
aboard the rotating earth, orbiting the sun, spinning around the galaxy. And the
galaxy itself is hurtling through the universe. So you're moving really fast in a
dozen different circles all the time. Luckily, so is your bed and everything else
in your room. They're all at rest, relative to you, but not relative to light."

What? Did he really..? I am staring away like Jim from The Office, into an imaginary camera right now.

This is, perhaps, the worst instructional web design text I have ever come across. I came across a copy for free but I still paid too much.

I am familiar with CSS but for the reader that this book is clearly aimed toward, this text would be a disaster for several reasons:

Explanations of basic concepts are unclear and sometimes appear to trail off in the middle of a concept. (See "Controlling Layout with Offsetting", for example.)

Extremely "un-sound" advice is given, such as using descriptive words for colors rather than hex codes (called a "bizarre RGB equivalant" Whaaa?").

The book is about CSS. About cascading style sheets, that is, standards compliant design, and yet at every turn the author is advising the reader to use proprietary code. One of the most central issues of web design is the awareness of the number of different browsers used and cross-platform issues, and yet at every turn the author seems to be portraying a web where everyone uses IE and where IE is some kind of gold standard of how a browser should behave (cough). This flies in the face of the entire basis of CSS.

I saved the best for last, the part where my eyes nearly fell out of my head, page 79, and I quote: "But my advice is to just assume that pretty much everyone who'll see your Web page uses IE. Why? Because most everyone *does* use IE.

Where can I go from that? I have never felt so compelled to write a review. For the experienced designer, the book is funny enough to laugh about over lunch. For the novice designer taking this as a source of reliable information, the book is an unmitigated disaster. Stay away.

Do *not* buy this book. It is not well edited and contains numerous typos in the HTML and CSS syntax. It is now 2001 and this book was published in 1997, so it's very out of date. The browser compatibility charts only go up to Netscape 4 and Internet Explorer 4. There is no coverage of Opera at all. (The age of the book is not the author's fault, but if you are looking for a good reference, try Hakon Wium Lie and Bert Bos' book, or Eric Meyer's.)

This book represents one of the poorest editing jobs I've ever seen. The number of typos, images that don't match content, and outright errors make this book a pain to read. While there is useful info throughout, the poor editing quality is distracting.

This book is not worth it. There are a host of typos and other mistakes in it. Worse, at times there are mistakes in the authors' understanding of HTML rules (which makes me worry about their grasp of CSS).

The book also claims to be supported by a web site with "online tutorials about CSS, HTML, and up-to-the-minute information about these Web technologies." The site, however, has only one page (containing unrelated information about browsers) with one link -- to itself. I emailed the author to ask and was told he was behind and hasn't finished any of it yet. That was months ago.

This book does have some marginal value in that it lists things like common fonts available across several platforms, and it touches on advanced design issues. However, you will be far better off purchasing one of the other guides to CSS. Don't waste your money on this one.

This was an easy going, non-threatening intro to CSS. If your looking for something more in depth than some sterile CSS specification sheet, this is a good start. It starts with basic HTML and moves into CSS and tables. It even touches on DHTML and frames. However, there were many typos in the book and it did lack a quick reference section.

I had been looking for a well-written, fast paced introduction to CSS and I found it in Thurott's book.

The book gets you past the technical mumbo-jumbo and shows you examples and code straight away, so that you can start doing CSS, which is the best and only way to learn.

A guide in the back of the book lists all the CSS declarations and which browser supports them - that alone is invaluable.

If you want to learn CSS but have been intimidated, I highly recommend this book.

This works well for beginners but it is not a comprehensive guide. I thought it was mostly web, however it's got more print media than anything else. I would have preferred more web layouts...

This is a book of basic grids. It is great for me. I design real estate fliers, hospital pamphlets, etc. The designs are not ground breaking. They are basic but give someone a good place to start. There is a bonus CD of both Quark and InDesign templates which is perfect. And the files match a guide in the book. I just match it up, open up the file and work my magic. I do wish they made a 2nd edition with more complex designs, as they are on a good path here. The web designs are an odd addition to the book and should have been kept separate. I hate when books try to mix print and web together when it's unnecessary in 99% examples. If you need basic design ideas and templates, this is good for you. If you liked the "Graphic Design Cookbook" then you'll like this. If you are looking for flashy and wild examples, this is not for you.

When I purchased this book, no reviews yet existed for it; I bought it solely based on the alluring title and cover. Next time I'll wait for another canary shopper to drop dead in this hazardous mine of a book.

The main problem with the book is in how little relevant content there actually is. The author cuts each section into 1-3 pages, and the examples look about a decade removed from the date of this review. With the examples bringing so little to the reader, there just isn't anything else to learn from.

I'm not sure who this book would benefit. Graphic design students will learn more in a half-semester than this book can teach. People like me who simply wish to learn about grids will certainly be disappointed. This is a book that only a mother could love.

I've recently bought this book and expected some nice illustrations, modern grids, stylish examples, but found nothing. Whether you are experienced graphic/web designer or inexperienced you will find it mostly useless. In comparison with other books about grids: Josef Muller-Brockmann "Grid Systems", Kimberly Elam "Grid Systems, Timothy Samara "Making and breaking the grid", etc. this book has very poor, not stylish examples and explanations. Expected so much more, moreover there are not so many books about Grids. Thanks for attention!

I wish I would have had some kind of insight into this book before buying it. It seemed like they had a good break down of each, and what they had available. Not so. Even worse, a lot of the templates are very outdated. About 50% of the templates on here are webpage tempates, and they really aren't that good. If I could go back, I certainly wouldn't pay $15+s&h for this. It's just not that good at all...
As for information, don't bet on it. You get maybe 2 pieces of information. This book is decently organized, but that's about it.
Not recommended at all.

This is rather a criticism about the way in which you present the book "The Best in Classic Rock Sheet Music : Piano, Vocal, Chords" .One cannot understand the actual content of the book without an excerpt or sample of its pages. It is not enough with the index. So I would appreciate if you include these mentioned information so we can get an exact idea about the book. I would recommend you to do the same for any music book. Thanks.

While I don't own this book, I would never buy it online with the way you presented it. To buy a music book, you need not only to see an index of the songs included, but also a few pages out of the book (even if not from the same page if you don't want to provide too much free content)... The reason for this is music can be too easy and too difficult to play. The worst feeling in the world is getting a book you ordered online only to find it is too boring to play because the music is too easy, or too difficult to play so it just stands on the bookshelf waiting for a more proficient player. Please provide us with more, this is true of all your sheet music.

There is no way to represent everyone's idea of what "The Best" classic rock sheetmusic collection should be. However, "The Best in Classic Rock Sheetmusic" does a pretty good job...Some major classics are there; Hotel California, Stairway to Heaven, Light my Fire and some older classics such as Bad Moon Rising, Heart of Gold and Joy to the World. The size of the book works better for laying it out without it flipping back closed when you're playing. The smaller paperback books are harder to use. Overall, the scores are easy to read, lyrics are correct and the skill level ranges from easy-Night Moves, Old time Rock n Roll, to more challenging works-Aqualung, What a fool believes... The quality of what's in the book is great but, having only 25 songs, it left me wanting more to choose from (worth the $12 price though).