HTML & CSS

This 500 page book on HTML and CSS is definitely not pleasure reading. I read it because I was just learning how to build websites with a no-code builder (Webflow) and a talking head on Youtube that I admire recommended it.

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It was published in 2011, and web design has changed a lot since then (there is an entire chapter on Flash!). But a lot has stayed the same too. So while I won’t be sitting down to debug or write code any time soon, I’m no longer wary of the symbol salad, and now understand it to some degree.

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This book represents what I hope is a trend in the teaching of complex topics: the design of it is remarkable. The body copy is displayed in text blocks with very tight margins, major concepts are shown in large, color-coded 2-page spreads, and every learning point is shown as code and as it would look when rendered.

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I wouldn’t recommend the book because what I learned from it could have been shared in a 5 minute video. But it’s really fabulous to see new methods being used to teach complex topics.

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