No one doubts that learning something new is a good way to increase job security, productivity and overall happiness.

But in these tough economic times, it’s one of the mayor things people tend to spend time and money on. At least online:

The graph above shows the traffic boosts some online universities have been getting over the last months (although you may not be able to see it, ashford.edu has also doubled their traffic in the last months with an estimate of about 200.000 visitors).

If an online degree doesn’t sound appealing to you, simply reading a book can bring the same benefits.

Some suggestions:

I hope to order and read these this year. (Although I don’t know about the last one yet: it’s not the book I would usually read, but Andy pointed me to its site and the user story is just so funny.)

A clearly commercial post from time to time doesn’t hurt anyone.

Especially if it is about such a controversial device:

Today, Amazon released the second version of their Kindle. It has many improvements, including a better integration of the previously annoying paging buttons.

While some people can’t see the advantages in a device like this, you must admit Amazon is trying its best to build a useful replacement for “dead-tree” books. I have never seen one, but the “E-Ink” paper-like screen technology makes the screen readable everywhere (even in bright sunlight) and consumes significantly less power than a regular LCD.

Sadly, the price is still outrageously high.

As I went through the CSS related books I ordered first, here’s another one: The Art and Science of CSS.

Since this is the first book I ever ordered published by the famous Australian web design/development community I must admit I didn’t expect it to be of the same “level” as an O’Reilly book for instance. But that didn’t turn out to be an issue at all. On the contrary: given the books structure I don’t think they could have done a better job explaining the different subjects they picked.

While the structure is in some way similar to Bulletproof Web Design, this book describes a few different common scenario’s you’ll come across. Although they are not similar to the former, I find them better explained. Where Bulletproof Web Design is suited for a broader audience, this one touches the limits of CSS support in the current browser versions (pre-IE 8).

One section that I found particularly useful was the one about Forms. It basically tells you how to fine-tune to the default Zend_Form set-up many people have been struggling with.

My opinion

I think people new to markup – layout separation, should read one of the other SitePoint books first. After that, The Art and Science of CSS is one you should keep on your desk when crafting XHTML & CSS pages.

I recently bought 7 books on Amazon and I will try to write a review of each as I read them. Note: this could take some time because of my workload.

The first one is Bulletproof Web Design by (the famous) Dan Cederholm of SimpleBits.

“The book contains several guidelines to help prepare compelling designs for worst-case scenarios, increasing user control and readability for varying text sizes and amounts of content.”

It explains clearly (as clear as a book can ever get) what best practices are for some common web design scenario’s. It is not a bible nor a reference: it roughly takes 10 common problems you may have experienced (or will someday) and tells you how do to this in a bulletproof way. Personally, I could also see benefits in taking one “project” (website) and applying all best practices to that one subject (for continuity), but the author chose to do this with separate examples. I guess the book benefits from that by the very low prerequisite knowledge you need to read it.

My main intention when buying this book was to verify if my xHTML & CSS knowledge was up to date by comparing it to Dan’s preachings. You can argue that this book isn’t the most appropriate since it was published in 2005 (although this is the second version, published in 2007) with techniques that could be outdated. I hardly believe this is an issue though. For example: a layout made with web standards for IE7, FireFox 2 and Safari 2 should not break on IE8, FireFox 3 or Chrome (note the “should” of course).

My opinion

A must read for anyone writing (x)HTML & CSS. I guarantee you will learn at least 5 important best practices or improve your knowledge of them which makes it worth every penny.
Most certainly if you ever wondered how to get those floating containers to do exactly what you want on every browser!