New book: Designing with tables using CSS

[Mendo Man]

http://www.sitepoint.com/books/css1/

I've read and am playing with code now. Note that on this page, there's a link on the left side to a code archive. That gives you sever pre-coded examples to build from.

I'm really interested in reducing k-size on many of the pages I code, so if this works out, it would be terrific.

Richard

[Mendo Man]

http://www.sitepoint.com/books/phpmysql1/

This is the first book the Sitepoint gang put out, about a year ago. If you're a DIY developer, either by choice or not, this is probably the best introduction to PHP and MySQL basics out there.

Last spring, I found myself with a 90-day deadline to build the back end of a news website. I looked at a lot of commercial and shareware CMS systems and finally, almost as a last resort, I decided to see if I could code something myself.

I had a working knowledge of basic Perl heading into this, and dreaded learning another language. I came to realize that PHP is incredibly user-friendly for rookie coders, and getting it to talk to mySQL is fairly easy.

I got the site done (http://www.soundspike.com) almost completely based on the tutorials in the book. It's written for the beginner and makes no major assumptions about your background in coding.

I'm now working on a rebuild of the back end for Soundspike and on a couple of other projects, thanks to what I know from this book (and a couple of others I'll be glad to list if anyone's interested).

Highly recommended.

[deker]

If you are interested in CSS, I also highly recommend this book by Jeffrey Zeldman (www.zeldman.com):

Designing with Web Standards (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0735712018/qid=1056982247/sr=1-4/ref=sr_1_4/103-7644392-8151802?v=glance&s=books)

It's not so much a technical CSS reference as just a book telling you how to use your technical CSS knowledge in the real world to create standards compliant and forward compatible web sites. It's written very well and really explains good use of CSS. Definitely worth the read for every web designer out there.

[Mendo Man]

Thanks for the tip!