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Christopher Duncan wrote: I've been hacking my way through CSS for years
just give up and use tables
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 NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Keep Clam And Proofread
--
√(-1) 23 ∑ π...
And it was delicious.
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It’s going to take him just 45 minutes to undo the last several years worth of CSS work. He's going to launch his site. And then, he's going to go and get a donut.
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Donut, hell. Try tequila. 
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Most books I've read like that are VERY dry reading and mainly used as reference. I've run into the same problem with Photoshop, I'm on about my 5th one and it is of the "...missing manual" name/type also and is a very good book.
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Yeah, it was not only well written but also well edited. And trust me, having just wrapped up two books in the past few months, you have no idea how important it is to have a good editor (which I happily did). I think the missing manual series has a really good team.
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Christopher Duncan wrote: And trust me, having just wrapped up two books in the past few months, you have no idea how important it is to have a good editor
Yeah I could imagine you would be sensitive to that. It's always nice to read a book that's accurate and grammatically pleasing.
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There are actually a couple of editors on a book, who serve different purposes.
Jeff Olson was the editor for both books. The editor is the person in charge who oversees the project, making sure the concept is good, all the chapters work well together and that it's a coherent bit of work. He also happens to be the executive editor of the business division overall, so I was lucky to get him on my team.
Cleaning up my dubious grasp of the English language fell to Jana Weinstein, my copy editor. She's the one who kept me from looking stupid in public. No small task. 
Rita Fernando was the project manager who kept the wheels on the wagon and made sure everything was taken care of and delivered on time. Publishers usually take a year or so to release a new title. These guys got two books on the streets in six months.
There were other bits ilke indexing, compositing, etc. but these three were the team that I interacted with as I wrote them. I'm sure you've been on bad software projects before, so you can imagine how much I appreciated having top flight people to work with. Lots of fun. I'd work with these guys again in a heartbeat.
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Mike, for PhotoShop, try Deke McClelland's "PhotoShop One-on-One" books (his latest in the series is for PhotoShop CS5, and was published in 2010): [^].
bill
Google CEO, Erich Schmidt: "I keep asking for a product called Serendipity. This product would have access to everything ever written or recorded, know everything the user ever worked on and saved to his or her personal hard drive, and know a whole lot about the user's tastes, friends and predilections." 2004, USA Today interview
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Thanks Bill I'll give it a look. I have CS6 but there's not that much difference and there may be an update.
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Christopher Duncan wrote: CSS3: The Missing Manual[^] (David Sawyer McFarland).
That looks great. I might be interested in the Javascript & jQuery book (and the HTML 5 one) as well. Thanks for pointing these out!
Marc
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I got this one for JQuery: JQuery Compressed[^]. Haven't started it yet so I can't speak to the quality. Would be interested in what you come up with. A glance at the TOC seems to indicate that JQuery isn't a terribly deep subject.
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Christopher Duncan wrote: A glance at the TOC seems to indicate that JQuery isn't a terribly deep subject.
It may not be terribly deep, but being rather clueless about it at the moment, it looks like a vast uncharted ocean. 
Marc
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Yeah, I can dig it. That's why I've had my nose buried in books for MVC, JQuery, CSS, etc. the past couple of weeks. After so many years in this business, it's kinda nice to start out knowing nothing, ain't it?
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Christopher Duncan wrote: it's kinda nice to start out knowing nothing, ain't it?
To some extent. Unfortunately, my entry into this has been to work with other people's code in fairly large applications, which means walking into poorly designed and poorly documented vats of spaghetti code. One of the projects (a Ruby on Rails project) added the additional complexity layers of Slim (actually a very nice way of working with HTML and metadata) and SASS (actually also a very nice way of working with CSS.) It's been an incredibly frustrating experience.
On the other hand, I've started writing a RoR site for navigating SQL Server databases, I call it the "Spider UI", and decided to take on SASS and SLIM on my own. What I discovered is that it is CRITICAL to explain the intention behind the markup and the CSS. I'll give you an example:
SLIM (slimmed down HTML):
- # table navigation
.navigation
fieldset
legend Navigation:
br
= f.submit("Show All Records", name: 'navigate_show_all')
br
- # Separate div because 'Go' buttons are left padded.
.nav_options
br Navigate to parent:
= select_tag "cbParents", options_from_collection_for_select(@parent_tables, 'id', 'name')
= f.submit("Go", name: 'navigate_to_parent')
br Navigate to child:
= select_tag "cbChildren", options_from_collection_for_select(@child_tables, 'id', 'name')
= f.submit("Go", name: 'navigate_to_child')
SASS:
.navigation
float: left
width: 200px
height: 600px
padding-top: 23px
padding-left: 20px
fieldset
width: 240px
height: 592px
.nav_options
select
width: 80%
margin-bottom: 15px
input
margin-left: 5px
Notice that I put in a comment: /* Separate div because 'Go' buttons are left padded. */ in both to explain why I have a separate div. It's stuff like that that drives me nuts when taking on existing web-apps and there's absolutely no comments to convey the intention of the markup.
Another thing that has made working with legacy code complicated is the arcane and idiomatic usage of Ruby. For example, tell me what this does:
Hash[keys.zip values]
You probably have no clue, and neither would I. Now, tell me what this does:
# Given two arrays of equal length, 'keys' and 'values', returns a hash of key => value
def hash_from_key_value_arrays(keys, values)
Hash[keys.zip values]
end
OH! Now, sure, I've created a one line function, but it sure makes code like this:
def self.convert_to_array_of_hashes(fields, records)
array = []
records.each { |record|
dict = hash_from_key_value_arrays(fields, record)
array << dict
}
array
end
a lot more readable!
So, the moral of the story is, learing RoR, Javascript, Sass, Slim, and all the other players is a process of "unlearning" all the stuff I've been exposed to by bad programming practices and instead, developing my own best practices for these technologies. It's actually that "meta-learning" that I enjoy the most.
(yet another lengthy reply to Christopher - what is it about your posts that get me going???)
Marc
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Marc Clifton wrote: For example, tell me what this does:
I believe in some states it gives you legal grounds for homicide.
This is one of the reasons I prefer desktop or system programming to web development, even though I do mostly the latter these days. There's no reason you can't write pro quality code, but it's very common to see amateurish stuff in client side markup and scripting. Almost a web tradition. I guess because it was easy for people to fire up Front Page, go into the html to add a "blink" attribute and then say, "Look, mommy, I'm a programmer!".
Don't get me wrong, I've seen plenty of crappy application code too, but the guys who come up via the traditional route tend to have a lot more discipline and, in my opinion, professionalism. They've also lived long enough to know what happens to guys who write code like that.
Marc Clifton wrote: (yet another lengthy reply to Christopher - what is it about your posts that get
me going???)
Probably because we've both been through the wars.
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Missing Manual is a really good series. My wife really liked CSS: the missing manual when she read it a few years back.
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Yeah, it looks like the series got bought out by O'Reilly - or maybe they had it all along. Either way, they've always been a good tech publisher so the quality isn't surprising.
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thx for sharing, I might just buy this book
I think it's the same for me, I just figure out how to get something to look like the way I want, and move on without caring about css organization, structure, maintainability, etc... pretty bad I know...
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Yeah, I figured since MVC gives you so much more control over the markup I should, you know, maybe learn something about it.
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Thanks for the heads-up on those. I'm going to order the CSS3 and HTML5 books.
I have a couple of the "missing manual" books at home. They're nice quality and unlike those sell-by-the-pound books we're use to seeing, it's nice to see books that don't buckle the bookshelf.
If there is one thing more dangerous than getting between a bear and her cubs it's getting between my wife and her chocolate.
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And of course, thanks to eBooks, my shelves don't creak nearly as much as they used to.
I have books on my shelves that have been there for 30 years, like Richard Bach's Illusions. I have zero confidence that an eBook I buy today will still be available to me three decades from now, so if it's something timeless I still buy it in paper.
Tech books, on the other hand, have a shelf life that can be measured with an egg timer. Can't count how many I've thrown out, or how much bitching and moaning I've endured from my non-geek friends about having to move boxes of heavy books. So, the geek stuff I buy on Kindle. Best of both worlds.
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My problem with most computer books is they spend way too much time hyping the topic and assuming you are a moron, though I have found most O'Reilly books pretty good in general, with the Nutshell series being especially so.
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Nutshell books are consistently good and it seems like that's the case with the missing manual series as well.
I just bought the worst tech book I've ever purchased in this batch as well, an html book that I thought was going to cover basics for techies from looking at the overview. Instead, it has lots of puppies and cutesy images for the "I know you think computers are scary, but here's how to make a web page" crowd. Makes me appreciate O'Reilly ever so much more.
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His earlier book was great. I'll have to pick up the new version!
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