Book Review – Bulletproof Web Design

Bulletproof Web Design was recommended to me by Steve Harman, when I posted a question on the Subtext forums about CSS and Skinning. Before getting this book, I had very limited knowledge of CSS. After going through the book and trying out the examples in it, I have now made my own subtext skins from scratch using CSS solutions described in the book and am on my way to creating some free skins for other subtext users.

My experience with this book.

• Each of the first 8 chapters in the book takes on a specific design item, highlights the problem with it, and then walks you through a CSS solution that is bullet-proof, i.e. that will likely not “break” your site if things are changed / options disabled. I found this problem-solution approach very practical as I was myself facing some of these issues in my website skins.
• The book has a clean simple layout and typeset, with tips in the sidebars and space to write down notes. It is also very readable in the sense that the language is simple and straigh forward and not stuffed with complex sentences or keywords or useless rambling disversions and clever jokes as seen in plenty of technical books out there.
• The last chapter, called ‘Putting it all together’ walks you through an exercise that refreshes all the techniques learned so far. This is a nice way for you to recap what you have read from the beginning.
• As you go through the sample code segments, the code incremental from the previous step is highlighted in red. This is a great idea for speed readers who just want to get on with the code quickly.

What I took away from the Book.

I realize how powerful pure CSS based site design can be. Most importantly, I now understand the importance of making your site accessible. Using simple CSS techniques demonstrated in this book, you can create sites that could let the user change font-sizes of the text on the fly or browse the site even if images or CSS is disabled. This will ensure that the user has a very pleasant and rewarding overall experience on your site. To an extent, it will also make them feel that they are in control of the UI. On a side note, I now also understand why Internet Explorer is disliked by Web Designers / CSS developers so much. There is a separate section in this book that talks about IE hacks, which are essentially CSS code changes you have to make, in order to your ensure the bulletproofness of your CSS code in Internet Explorer.

Related Links:

• Dan Cederholm’s Website.
• CSS-techniques you couldn’t live without.
• 24 ways.