Chasing Grace

I just finished this book and it has been very helpful. I have been using it to teach myself CSS design. That is, it’s been helpful when it wasn’t giving me a headache.

In the last lesson, “Bringing It All Together”. Many of the written rules that you are instructed to write in the practice style sheet was incorrect. I had to dig through the book to figure out the correct code. I think maybe the reason for that was Mr. Meyer’s enthusiasm for using ‘fragments’

…plain-text files with the portions of the style sheet you’ll be using in each exercise… an easier method for users of BBEdit from Bare Bones Software. Simply click and drag the .txt file icons into your open CSS file to paste the contents there.

I understand Mr. Meyer wanting to plug his favorite text editor in his book, but I don’t have that text editor, and I like mine just fine. I think in his zeal to promote the ‘click and drag’ fragments, he paid little attention to the code that most of his readers would actually have to type into the style sheet. This caused me no little frustration during the summary lesson of an otherwise perfectly nice book.

One other, albeit minor complaint I have was being taken step-by-step through an exercise is using a certain CSS application, and then immediately afterward being advised to ‘never do it that way’. I felt like it was a waste of time, and didn’t add anything to what I was learning. The effort of learning it, and then having to subsequently forget it contributed to the headache I seemed to always have after using this book.

Otherwise, it’s a nice book written in a friendly style. I certainly know a lot more about CSS than I did before I started it. I suppose that’s all that really matters.