Just recently I was fortunate enough to win a copy of Jason Teague’s book in a small competition he ran on Twitter. It was simple enough: post a tweet with the link to his site and advert for the book and the #SIS tag; Be one of the following numbered tweets (1st, 5th & 10th) and you won a copy. Just as I saw this, my internet connection went up in smoke (thanks Virgin Media – Virgin on the plain stupid). Fortunately, the connection came back and there were 4 tweets and with a quick tweet, it was mine!!!

Well today it finally arrived via an extremely paranoid delivery service. He knocked on my door, asked my name, double checked the number of the house (Emblazoned in coloured glass above the door, not easily swapped out to deceive postmen that’s for sure). Again he checked who I was; looking at me sternly in the hope I would crack and reveal my evil post stealing ways. Eventually he seemed convinced enough that I was me and grudgingly handed me my package.

After my fighting, in my hands was a lovely glossy book with a very nice speech bubble on the front. I must note that it mentions Virgin as one of the companies he’s worked for. Well we can’t hold that against him forever.

The Main Thread of the Book

To get the best results for your designs, you need to learn how to speak in styles.

To paraphrase slightly and as a coder foremost, I read this book to be saying:-

Designers, if you are going to get proper control over your designs once they make it to the screen, then stop whinging about slight off-placement of an image, or the wrong size font and do it yourself!

Ok so that might be a little harsh, but I think you get the idea. Jason says – and I happen to agree with him – that if a designer is going to design for the Internet, they need to have a clue as to how everything gets to that point. As Jason points out, most print designers know the whole print process inside out. Why shouldn’t it be the same for the Internet?
This book is also aimed at the new coder or hobbyist that wants to learn CSS. In this respect, it does fantastically well. The sections are in a wonderfully logical order. It seems each page in the book is a wonderful little morsel of CSS code that can be digested in parts or in one whole sitting. It rarely gets over complicated and I don’t think it ever gets very “techy” either.

As I read all this, it did cross my mind that this book was not really for me. However, I’ve never been one for listening to myself so I decided to read it anyway. I’m glad I did. Let me say now that apart from two breaks I sat and read that book from cover to cover.

Part 1: What is a website?

“A good place to start”, thought I; and it seems to be just that. Jason takes the reader through the basics of the building blocks of a website, HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Throughout the book, these three building blocks are segregated by use of an intuitive and familiar colour system. HTML = Red, CSS = Green, JavaScript = Blue. A nice touch, making it extremely easy to tell at a glance what language is being referred to.

Now if, like me, you’re familiar with building websites, you may want to skip this part. It’s a very simple section made for those with little or no clue how “all the magic happens”. I tried to suspend belief and pretend that I was not a s***-hot programmer, but alas I couldn’t. Regardless, I’ve read a few books aimed at the newbies to CSS, and to be honest it’s one of the better ones I’ve scanned.

All in all, this is a great little section: one part seems aimed solely at designers who like to shout that they aren’t programmers. At this point it throws in the horror of cross browser compatibility problems. I personally feel that this horror becomes a very good reason to learn CSS. Put bluntly, I’m considering force feeding this to my current designer until he farts selectors!

Part 2: CSS Grammar

‘Talking with you is sort of the conversational equivalent of an out of body experience.’
Bill Watterson – Calvin & Hobbes

This is the part where the title of the book actually begins to make sense. We’re introduced to something that, as native speakers of CSS, us coders do without thinking: speaking in styles. The box with the ID of header is 999 pixels wide and has a background image which is found at this URL. Simple enough you might think. But ask yourself: how many times has the designer told you of a problem he has seen and has not been able to convey it properly? How many times have you wished you and the designers spoke the same language? This book hopes to change that.

This part also has a clear, concise list of usable CSS for the everyday jobs you would encounter when creating web pages. It does not go into much depth, but it does give a small nod to the newer enhanced properties of CSS3, particularly box and text shadows, and rounded borders amongst others. This makes it a very handy resource for those just starting out that need the odd reminder.

Part 3: Speaking like a native

Or learning to speak proper like what I do

This section is a must read for all levels. In this section, Jason sets out some great ideas on design planning, implementation and refinement. Whatever your level, the chances are that you will get something from this section to make your entire design-to-build cycle more efficient and streamlined.

There are a few things that made me come away from this section thinking “Yes I could incorporate that”. There are also some parts of this section where I wonder if the action suggested is viable for a small business needing to turn over quickly. On the whole, efficiency is efficiency, and no matter the level you are coding at you should be striving to be as efficient as you can.

Jason also lists some great on-line application resources that can at the very least release some of the strain on our already app-full hard drives. However, I did note that he missed off BrowserShots – a tool I regularly use to check almost every variation of browser on the page I am building.

Conclusion

This is a great book for designers and beginners in the world of CSS. It looks to the past with IE hacks and some solutions for the major IE bugs, it’s up to date – including the new @font-face principle for using “non-standard” fonts – and also looks to the future, encouraging use of new CSS3 properties even if not supported by all browsers.
One part of the book I did not entirely agree with was Jason’s implication that validation is kind of unnecessary. I may have read it wrong, but it comes across this way.

Yes, I know that the code is more what you’d call ‘guidelines‘ than actual rules (Yarr, not the Pirate Code Cap’n Barbosa), but validation can be extremely helpful at times. Code that validates is very likely to display correctly on a large number of platforms. He does point out that generally it’s the IE hacks that cause the validation errors, yet personally I just switch these out into a separate IE sheet and use a conditional comment. I feel the loading time increase for the extra request is offest by the ability to say your code validates and is technically perfect. After all with the new kick towards standards compliancy, shouldn’t we be at the forefront of this? If we are going to shout for IE to be correctly standards compliant, shouldn’t we care enough to do it ourselves?

Conclusion

…this time honest

This book is great, a bit short, lacking in plot and the ending was really obvious! I mean who wouldn’t have guessed the appendices did it?!

If you’re new to CSS then I’d recommend you spend the money on it, if you’re a designer definitely spend money it. Read it, absorb it and listen to it! If you are a hardened coder you could spend the money on this but you won’t gain much from it. If you like shiny things or good books, then buy and read this book, or just stroke the glossy pages.

Well that’s all I can really say about this book without blatantly plagiarising it and as I’m linking Jason to this I don’t think I should. I recommend you visit the speaking styles site to learn more about the book and where you can get it, and also follow Jason on Twitter.

Thanks for reading, and let me know what you think to the review, haven’t done one since High school!