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Book Review – Bulletproof Web Design

Bulletproof Web Design by Dan Cederholm discusses a number of Web Design solutions that can serve as a strong base for designing a bulletproof website. “Bulletproof” means that a site will render in all different browsers and will also allow users to adjust their screen resolution and text size without ruining the layout and the functionality of the site.
I have read quite a number of books on CSS over the last years and this is one of the better ones.
The problem with many other books is that they suggest using CSS to do things it isn’t really meant to do.
They discuss solutions that work well in one particular environment but can’t be applied to too many other websites.
Since there is no all-inclusive guide to building the perfect webpage in CSS yet (I keep dreaming about this book) we have to settle for the next best things.

Bulletproof Web Design is organized in 9 chapters on 270 pages and is fairly easy to understand. Sometimes I missed a “here is the total code discussed in this chapter” page at the end of the chapters.

Dan Cederholm definitely focuses on the core strengths of CSS: Much shorter code, clear separation of content and formatting and solutions that are cross-browser friendly without requiring too many hacks.

We used some of the ideas in his book when we redesigned the conceptbakery website and were very please with the results.

For all those guys out there who are still using table based designs and thing whether it worth the effort to spend a little time and/or money for a more modern layout: The size of our average html page is reduced by over 80% in size and number of characters – even with more content in the pages.

Get it at Amazon: Bulletproof Web Design