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So you know HTML, you've probably heard of styles sheets, and you want to know more. You want to actually learn them instead of having some confusing reference that assumes you know something already. Hands down, this is your book. Period.

You can download example files and use them with the easy to understand exercises in the book. Unlike many computer books, this one is in ENGLISH and the examples actually WORK! Pretty nifty eh?

Not only does Steve make style sheets easy to learn, he gives you a heads up as to what browsers may have trouble interpreting style sheets and what to do about it. I've tested these out, primarily in Opera and IE, with no problems whatsoever. (At least) basic knowledge of CSS will make design and presentation of web pages more fluid and easier to manage. It will also come in handy if you focus on search engine optimization.

Do you need any special software to get the most out of this book?

No.

Has Microsoft taken any functionality out of their "consumer" operating systems that will prevent you from using this book?

No, you can learn CSS on just about any platform or OS.

What do you need besides this book to learn CSS?

A plain text editor like notepad and a browser will do the trick.

Buy this book if you want to learn style sheets from scratch. Don't even consider anything else. Great work Steve, Thanks!

Steve Callihan's first book, "Create Your First Web Page in a Weekend" helped me create my own website when I literally didn't know the first thing about how to go about it. He has a teaching style that starts out simply, without assuming prior knowledge. He lays a foundation and then builds on that. It was a great way to learn HTML, and now the same teaching style is helping me learn Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). HTML lets you establish the content of your web pages, but gives you very little control over their presentation. It was never intended to do things like set margins and font sizes, and the TABLE tag wasn't intended as a page layout tool but that's what everyone does with it. However, in this book, Mr. Callihan shows how you can use CSS for page layout and accomplish the same thing, only with much greater control. In fact, CSS gives you the power to control everything about your web pages to achieve any look you want, and it's easy! Steve's book goes way beyond just giving you the properties and values you can use with CSS, but he shows you (by example) HOW and WHY to use them. A lot of work obviously went into this book. I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to learn CSS the easy way. Five stars!

I have been easing into CSS for a few months now. I mainly get my information from websites and tutorials. This book helped me SO MUCH. In the fist two chapters my eyes were opened to things I had already done but didn't understand why they worked or didn't work. It is great for anyone new to CSS and feeling a little confused.

They didn't give "no stars" as an option or I certainly would have selected it. This is a complete waste of money. I was shocked to discover that this is not even a real book. It appears that someone printed this out in their basement, then went to Kinkos and had it bound between two pieces of cardboard with plastic. I've handed in college papers that looked better, and contained more than the sparse 40 pages this does. Reduce the font and this is probably 15 typewritten pages at best. Stay away.

This TCP/IP addressing book is the first book i have seen to cover the subject of Addressing and Subnetting. I have found it be excellent in explaining the subject in a great detail, I highly recomend this book for telecommunications people or any body who deals with networking.

I just want to thank Mr. Mahafzah for this great book and keep up the good work.

This Book was very helpfull, it is simple and has all the steps needed to undertsand addressing, subnetting. I recommend this for all students who have difficulty understanding TCP/IP subnetting.

This Kent Beck title is an introduction to the world of Test-Driven Development (TDD). The book teaches the concepts of TDD by working through two complete sample projects. Along the way, Beck gives the reader valuable insight into the thought process and techniques behind successful test-driven development. When the reader has finished working through these sample projects, he should know enough about TDD to get started working on a TDD project.

The book is divided into three sections. The first two sections are each walkthroughs of the aforementioned sample projects using TDD. The third section is a collection of notes and useful tips to try to get the most out of TDD. If you've ever read anything from Beck, then you should be familiar with his style. If you haven't, Beck is an engaging enough writer, and the text flows smoothly and is fairly pleasant to read.

It would help to be familiar with some member of the xUnit family prior to reading this book. Beck uses Java and JUnit for the first section, but never really goes into discussing the JUnit API. Readers unfamiliar with xUnit may have no idea how to proceed with writing their own tests using one of these frameworks. True the API is simple enough that its functions may be ascertained simply by reading the code, but this is no reason not to provide explanation. The second sample project is an actual implementation of xUnit, so a bit more information may be gleaned here. Beck made the curious decision to use Python as the language of implementation for the second project, although he does provide explanation of the language's fundamentals. Finally, none of the sample projects are really complicated enough to do more than get us going on the path of TDD. There will still be many hurdles to climb when working on a real-world project.

If you are seeking a basic introduction to test-driven development, then you might enjoy this title. If you are a Java developer interested in exploring TDD more in-depth, there are better books out there.

If you've never done or are curious about TDD, this is a great book to carefully walk you through learning how and why to do it. After following its practices a bit, I've also found it an indispensible way to write new projects, modules, and code. However, the book doesn't address what happens when:
- The code base is old, and doesn't have any tests or isn't designed testable. It makes it hard to do anything other than introduce integration-level tests and tweak to success.
- You're writing UI code for a serious application. It's straightforward to solve for a dialog framework, but when you're integrating with a major windowing framework that embeds serious functionality (Avalon, in my case), there are a whole set of issues he doesn't talk about.
- Design is part of your deliverable. I don't disagree that you can get pretty reasonble designs out of TDD & refactor. But I *do* disagree that, in practice, you get designs intended to version well, that your company is willing to support for the next decade or more. I've seen the code produced, and it just doesn't happen.

A good introduction, nonetheless. But watch out before you put on the preacher-hat after reading it and doing the exercises -- at least try to do it in part of one large, real-world product.

I bought this book for two reasons: it teaches TDD and it's spine has the thickness of a deck of cards.

I'll bet the XP adage "testEverythingThatCouldPossiblyBreak" is what prevents most programmers from taking up TDD. Who could blame them? If they truly tested all combinations and permutations they would take years to complete coding assignments and never stay employed.

Without being explicit, the author breaks that adage and introduces a practical, simple means for adopting a habit of writing tests first. "Red/Green/Refactor" is the mantra that he shows through the money example, this is the path towards a "Clean Code that Works" objective.

Honestly, I never got to parts II and III. Part I: "The Money Example" helped me clear the hurdles of tedium that you imagine in TDD; it alone is worth the price of the book.

This book is targetted towards intermediate and advanced users. Hence save your humor about your daughters in some other books. His previous book on VB 5: Hitchhiker's guide to VB was excellent. This one is written for clowns.
What I mean is: when I buy this kind of book which is targetted towards advanced users, I just need the technics so I can implement them quickly. So save the jokes for some other books. My suggestion is to buy Serious ADO: Universal Data Access with Visual Basic by MacDonald. If you only have a couple of weeks to implement some app using VB and ADO, this book will deliver.
I got my app running with solid foundations in no time.
When reading books for ADO, you need to understand connection objects, disconnected recordset, parameter objects etc. Serious ADO illustrates them rigorously - minus the jokes.

This the best book I've found on ADO. It is well written and beatifully organised. The key chapters for me were 4. Getting Connected 5. ADO Command Strategies 6. Recordset Strategies 7. Manipulating Your Recordset. There is also a great chapter on ASP as well as a chapter on moving data efficiently between tiers which are not my main focus. I didn't give it 5 stars because already it's a little dated. Nothing really on ADO 2.6 or SQL Server 2000. But it sholdn't be a handicap.

Also not much on esoteric command strategies such as creating Stored procedures on the fly where your parameter is in the Select or From clause.

It's not common to want to write a review about a book this one deserves taking some time out for it. Though I'm not new to programming I am to VB with SQL. I have been developement a quite complicated application with VB with SQL and not a day goes by that I have not used this book and found true real solutions and insight. This book was written for developers and answers the question we make quite directly. It is small but the point. Takes you by the hand (great for begginers in SQL developers, but has enough information for intermediate and advance developres.

After reading some of the other "by Example" books, this one was a disappointment. XML by example was excellent.
This book was too full of errors, and would do more harm than good for someone's first book.
There are better books out there to learn ASP.NET.

Perhaps a second edition, with closer editing, would be better

Pros:

1. The book really gets you to the code quickly which is what I like.

2. The book features code in both VB.NET and C#
(Francis B Gallagher from catonsville review incorrectly mentions that it does not contain code from both the lang. The author mentions on pg 42 that due to space constraints he will list only one lang or the other. The "other" code is available on the website.)

Cons:

I did not give it 5 stars because it assumes that you have already worked on ASP before and keeps making annoying comparisons throughout the text.

As the title says "ASP.NET by Example", this book is full of examples that we can use in a day to day ASP.NET web development environment. This book has everything that a ASP.NET Web developer should know.

Simple Statistics
Steven A.Smith, Nicholas Chase, Glenn Cook, Nathen Grass, Vincent W.Mayfield, Wynn Netherland, Scott Swigart and William Wise.

Publisher: QUE Pages: 527 Chapters: 18 (Including Appendix)

Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Overview .NET
Chapter 2: An Introduction to ASP.NET
Chapter 3: Migrating from ASP to ASP.NET
Chapter 4: The New ADO--ADO.NET
Chapter 5: HTML/Web Controls
Chapter 6: Using ASP.NET List Controls
Chapter 7: Using ASP.NET Rick Controls
Chapter 8: Using ASP.NET Validation Controls
Chapter 9: Using ASP.NET User Controls
Chapter 10: ASP.NET Applications
Chapter 11: ASP.NET and Web Services
Chapter 12: Custom ASP.NET Controls
Chapter 13: Debugging ASP.NET Overview
Chapter 14: Case Study in Ecommerce with ASP.NET
Appendix A The ASP.NET Syntax
Appendix B The ADO.NET Object Model
Appendix C VB.NET Programming Reference
Appendix D C# Programming Reference

Who is this Book for?

ASP.NET by Example is intended for people with some prior knowledge of Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASP) technology who are familiar with programming and dynamic data-driven Internet applications. However, you do not need to be an expert with VBScript, JScript or any other scripting language because they play a limited part in the future of ASP that is ASP.NET.

An insight into some of the Chapters

Migrating from ASP to ASP.NET is discussed very well in Chapter 3. This chapter gives you an over all idea about the major difference between classic ASP and ASP.NET. This mainly include the new file extensions that we have in ASP.NET, how to maintain state between ASP and ASP.NET, Language differences, how to declare the new Server controls in ASP.NET and so on. This chapter will be very helpful, if we need to convert a Classic ASP website into an ASP.NET website.

Chapter 4 gives us an overall idea about the major differences between ADO and ADO.NET. This has some good examples such as retrieving data from a table, calling stored procedures, inserting records into a table etc. This chapter also has some cool examples that deals with DataReader Object, SqlDataAdapter Object, DataSet Object, DataGrid Control, Repeater Control and DataList Control. Oh Man! You should keep this chapter always open while you are developing a web application using ASP.NET.

Another very interesting chapter in this book is the Chapter 8, "Using ASP.NET Validation Controls". Validating the user input is very simple with ASP.NET. This chapter has several examples that we use everyday. This chapter goes through all validation controls that is available in ASP.NET. RegularExpression is also discussed very well in this chapter. Now, you can use regular expressions to validate any input format that you may have in your web pages.

A vital concept in ASP.NET is the code behind concept. Chapter 9 takes you a tour about "User controls" in ASP.NET. If you wanna learn about creating user controls in ASP.NET, then you should read this chapter. The examples discusses in this chapter can be used in a real time environment. This chapter has a very good example on how to create a "Login user control". This example is a very useful one and is a must for every web site that has secure information that needs to be shared among different users.

Debugging ASP.NET applications is a must for every web developer. Chater 13 has all information regarding how to debug a ASP.NET application. This chapter has a cool example that can be used to "read the contents from event logs". Another interesting aspect of this chapter is the discussion on "Frequently encountered bugs" in ASP.NET.

If you are a ASP.NET developer, then you should have this book. I would rather like to call this book as "ASP.NET MSDN". Grab a copy of this today itself!

This book paid for itself the day I bought it. I found a solution to a problem which I had already spent a few hours on and had put aside. Swanke's solution was simple and clean. The book is packed with useful information and I like the way it is organized. I can find specifically what I need very quickly. The examples are explained very thoroughly so that you get depth of understanding in bite size chunks with each example rather than just a cut-and-paste solution. I have several MFC books and this is one of the few I take to work with me.

I read this book just out of curiosity and not to buy it because I had learned it through lots of frustration from other books. I always had the suspicion that there must be a better way to teach a beginner in MFC come up to speed quickly. After I read this book, I definitely believe it is the right book and bought it just to support the author. This book and perhaps VC++6 in 24 hours is probably all that one needs to quickly start rolling out powereful GUI applications. I don't think there is a book that covers runtime modifications of menus etc. and real life programming, in as short a time as John's book manages to accomplish. I have read at least 5 big volumes on MFC and VC++ programming and none come close.

While learning something new, it's always a dilema whether to learn concepts first, of whether to learn the application first. It's a lot easier, if you have a book like this, which maintains a proper balance for you.
language is good, examples are reasonably well structured, coverage is adequate. A great go for totally new beginner, but not much in for experienced one.
If you are starting with MFC, I strongly recommend this book for use and for ready reference.

I agree with fellow reviewer, James Tolley from NYC, I honestly don't understand how this book got such high ratings. I read with amazement other reviews by people who claim to be programmers, they must be pals of the author. I will itemize in detail where I find problems with this book:

1)
This book is riddled with typos and errors. Not a good thing when you are trying to learn something new. The book leads you astray. To the authors credit, he has published his book on a web site and it seems to be much better than the printed book. But then, why would you BUY the book? The good news is that the book provides nice wide margins so you can note the typos and make corrections.

2)
Examples of perl scripts (hence, Perl 5 by EXAMPLE) are all through the book and at first glance it looks like a great way to learn. Problem is, I've just found 2 examples (one right after the other) that don't even work as examples for what was taught. In chapter 5 we are learning about the "my" and "local" functions. I took the examples provided (from the Web site, mind you) and ran them with the "my" and with the "local" operators in them and they ran great. But then I removed them and the script produced the same result. So what was the point?

3)
This book offers review questions at the end of each chapter. The answers to the review questions are provided at the end of the book in Appendix A. That's good. However, in my opinion, the review questions aren't nearly as important as the review exercises that follow the questions at the end of every chapter. The exercises are where you are asked to write perl programs to reinforce what you learned in the chapter you just read. There are no answers to these all important exercises. Not in the book, not on the CD-ROM not on the author's web site. When I wrote to the author he offered to review my work as time permits. Nice offer, but not what I had in mind.

I have several books on perl and the O'Reilly books (i.e. Learning Perl) are far better. Learning Perl has exercises at the end of each chapter and the answers are provided in the back.

This book will only serve to confuse beginners with misinformation and force them to extra unnecessary effort in order to combat the lax attitude in which this book was produced. A proofreader that knows how to write perl might have helped on this account.

The concept for the book and the approach are terrific ideas. But do you want to have to read the book and then check the Web site and run every script to make sure you weren't given misinformation? This is a book that depends on you to allow for a "fudge factor." Expect more for your hard earned money.

I have been perl programming for a little over 2 years now, and this is the _best_ book I've found for beginning to intermediate programming. The O'Reilly books, even the "Learning Perl" book doesn't give the reader enough examples, nor are the explanations aimed toward the new programmer. Perl5 By Example does a fantastic job of explaining the examples given, and doing so in terms a new programmer would understand.

If you are thinking about learning how to program in PERL then by all means get a copy of this book. You'll also find it as a useful reference even after you master the basics.

I used to program in C/C++ and then use UNIX shell scripts to automate all the programs and processes on the server. Of course, that's until i discovered the power and advantages of PERL over scripting languages (ksh, bsh, etc) and decided to learn it. I picked up this book during the end of year holiday and learned all that i need to know to get started. I returned to my job two weeks later with enough knowledge to start writing programs in PERL and automating all our processes under UNIX.

Even after a year experience with PERL, i still come back to this book whenever i need to lookup a function or use regular expressions. Lots and lots of examples that will definitely speed up the learning curve.

The authors' expertise in the subject is clear. These guys have been doing this for a long time, and know it inside and out (or at least as well as can be expected at the time of writing). It reads really well, and their added insight is great.

My major issue with the book is that it really should have been titled "ADO.NET Examples and Best Practices for C# Programmers Who Are Already Experts in ADO Using SQL"

Basically if you aren't interested in the differences between ADO and ADO.NET, you'll find yourself skipping over quite a few sections. I got the feeling that I was reading stuff like this a lot - "This isn't any different than ADOc (how he refers to COM based ADO) so we'll just skip over that and get to what's different." Or - "Here is a comparison of how these ADO properties map to their ADO.NET equivalents."

In addition, if you are looking for info specific to anything other than SQL server, you may be disappointed. The book just makes minor mention of OLEDB.

If these issues aren't a concern for you, consider this a 5 star rating.

I would recommend this book, like other Bill Vaughn (BV) books, after you have been messing around with the technology (ADO.NET) for a little while. That is you should struggle with your own app for a couple of days first then pick up this book. If you are brand new to ADO.NET, and programming against databases in general, I would look elsewhere for an introductory book, but would come back to this book after you feel you have mastered the fundamentals. The feeling you get when reading this book is similar to playing a video game then going back and reading the manual that came with it. "Oh thats what THAT does" is a common feeling that I had. BV does an excellent job of going beyond the documentation, and the book comes with a CD loaded with code, but unless you have a laptop to look at it, say while you are at a conference, it is hard to appreciate the code in its entirety. Where BV thinks it is important to show actual code in the text, there are snippets that fill in the blanks nicely. I also liked the IMHO boxes that appear everywhere. In fact thats the first thing I read in each chapter to give me a flavor of what was in store. The book is primarily written from the point of view of you being the programmer talking to the data source directly and exposing the data source to interested clients. That is you are either the middle tier programmer or the client in a client server world.

My only complaint is that the book spends an amazing amount of time explaining how ADO (ADOc) is alike/different from ADO.NET. This is useful if you are an accomplished ADOc programmer, but utterly useless if you are starting from scratch with ADO.NET. This is, apparently, how BV learns and teaches new stuff. That style was evident when he first started writing about ADO when RDO was on the way out. It is an excellent way to learn new technology if you knew the old technology, but a hindrance if you knew little or nothing about the old subject matter.

Oh and by the way Bill......i will always call close on my SQLConnection objects. I got the message!

I thought I had already reviewed this book but I guess I didn't. This is a totally killer book from start to finish. There's simply nothing that isn't great about it. It's well written and never gets boring. Vaughn has a total command over what he writes and has an amazing knack for keeping things interesting (which is very important in computer books). His examples are all things you encounter every day. His insights are those of someone's who's dealt with virtually every scenario his readers may face. And in a nutshell, it's just a totally cool book by a totally cool author.

I am an abject book nut and I ADO.NET is probably one of my favorite subjects. With that said, I'm by default a huge fan of Mr. Vaughn but if you are going to do any ADO.NET programming, this is a must have title!

I strongly recommend against buying this book. A lot of the material covered in a first year Torts class is not covered in this book; a few examples are false imprisonment, defamation, and invasion of privacy. In addition, this book has MISTAKES in it regarding the law; one example is it does not specify the standard of care owed by a physician in a medical malpractice case correctly. Of course it does not even have a separate section dealing with duty owed by professionals...

Instead of this book, I would strongly recommend Understanding Torts by Diamond (Lexis) or the Law of Torts by Dobbs (West).

This book is too basic and only covers a small part of the first-year Torts course. Don't rely on this to help much for the exam! I would recommend finding something with more detail on Negligence and Products Liability.

I bought this book, but I happened to be lucky enough to have a wonderful torts professor so that I never even opened it. However, with that said, I still had experience with this book. My teacher used the examples from it constantly in class to help us understand torts, and it was wonderful. My professor openly advocates this book and many of my classmates swore by it. I do think it could use a little help on the negligence section, but if your torts professor was as horrible as some of my fellow 1Ls, then I highly recommend you purchase this book as a supplement to quiz yourself and make sure you've got those prima facie cases down pat, inside and out.

Before reading Yes/No Design, I never really thought about my personal taste in decorating, nor did I bother to explore my own creativity. When I found myself with the task of decorating my living room, I felt completely overwhelmed. I had read tons of magazines and asked for the opinions of my friends, as well the opinions of their interior designers. Once I read Diane Love's book, I found myself wondering what was it that I liked when it came to color? Furniture? Fabrics? I had no idea. The exercises in Yes/No design truly helped me, for the first time, locate my own imagination and style. I realized that lemon was going to be the color of my living room, and not yellow. I realized that an airy room was what I wanted, instead of a darker, stuffier one. Yes/ No helped me organize my thoughts, and in the end, helped me to decorate my home in only one way, mine!

A wonderful resource and a delightful read, Yes/No Design is an unique combination of tasteful "how-to", interior design consultant, and chic best friend. Through a series of pictorial and descriptive examples and thoughtful exercises, the author encourages the reader to recognize her own taste and to trust her own sense of style. The lessons learned and new awareness are meaningful and applicable in all areas --from interior design to personal styling. Yes/No Design is a book you'll want on your bedside table as well as on your coffee table. A great gift!

Not only is this book intelligent, but it calls on the reader to find her own creativity. So often we are told what to like and where to buy it. While these things can be helpful, if what you really want is to express yourself in your surroundings, then Yes/No Design will lead you within to uncover and create.

Living in a consumer culture, it is easy to get out of touch with our own expressive sides, and I really like how Ms. Love encourages us to take that journey back to our most original selves. If you are willing to complete the exercises and look at them as a whole, what you can find is nothing short of your self.

I think Yes/No Design is a text on how to distill out the essence of design as an act of personal creation. Rather than paying Ms. Love to tell us what to like, we are gaining something far more valuable with the purchase of this book -- a guide to our own creativity which we can then use to decorate our homes and every other area of our lives.