CSS, XHTML & CGI

Hello,

I'm hoping to pick some brains for a little advice here. I'm looking to buy books to help me on the following:

Using CSS for page layout and design (ie I want to use strict XHTML and not use tables, or anything for placing items on my pages).

I also want to learn cgi scripting for forms and menu selection (can I do that) on my pages. Currently, I have each page with the code for page selection so if I cahnge a link, I need to do each page. It'd be good if I could just send numbers across to a scripting program to do the pages for me - sjould be a lot easier I'd think!)

I'm hoping for some advice and thanks to any and all who contribute. For info, I usually get my books from compman.cou.k but am reluctant to spend money unless I have good recommendations - have purchased some dross in the past ;-)

Edited by deleted (Thu 20-Jul-06 09:41:14)

For CSS I definitely recommend "Professional CSS" published by Wrox (I think). I got it bought for me by my previous employer (I'm a web-developer) and found it invaluable as a reference. Not sure it's a total beginners book though - if you don't know the basics then maybe worth buying a more introductory book as well, or just use the internet.

Best way I found of learning CSS is to look for some cool websites and then just nick their CSS and pick it apart - you can find the CSS file by doing a "view source" on their webpage and looking for the CSS link, then copy the link url into your browser and saving the result.

It's not stealing unless you blatantly rip off their design in your own site, but using existing work to learn from is a good thing.

In reply to:

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Using CSS for page layout and design (ie I want to use strict XHTML and not use tables, or anything for placing items on my pages).

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I hope you won't avoid using tables completely. They do have a valid purpose (displaying tabular information)

Most 'proper' cgi is done in perl, but it may be easier for you to consider putting that sort of functionality into a php file - php is possibly the most widely supported web scripting language on hosts and the basics aren't too hard to learn. If you want to do it 'hard core' then fine, use perl - again for what you probably want to do, it won't be overy insane to sort out, just a little harder than php if you don't know either of them.

Unless you specifically want to learn on the move, there's probably little use in buying a book on either php or perl - there's so much info out there on the web you'd be daft not to want to take advantage of it

for perl, visit http://www.cpan.org/
for php, visit http://www.php.net/ http://www.phpbuilder.com/

In reply to:

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Best way I found of learning CSS is to look for some cool websites and then just nick their CSS and pick it apart - you can find the CSS file by doing a "view source" on their webpage and looking for the CSS link, then copy the link url into your browser and saving the result.

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Or try out a few open source CMS packages and start hacking the templates, serendipity is a good one as it's easy to install and templating can be done entirely with css. It's also a good route to learn some php as well. You will need php, mysql apache on a web server, or install apache on you local machine. I thinks it's a practical way to learn and there are some very good forums that support these CMS's, so your not in isolation. Oh, and use firefox, its very good for analyising page layout etc.

Just a thought.

To be honest, you can learn quite a bit of XHTML and CSS from veiwing the source of others' websites, and seeing if they validate or not.

I do that from time to time. Pick a random site. Pull the code to desktop and fiddle with until it validates. Good practice.

Try yourhtmlsource for beginner stuff on lots of web design stuff.

In reply to:

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Unless you specifically want to learn on the move, there's probably little use in buying a book on either php or perl - there's so much info out there on the web you'd be daft not to want to take advantage of it

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The web is a good reference when at the PC coding but you can't beat having books. An hours reading in bed before falling asleep or in front of the fire on a winters night really helps things settle in the brain.
IMHO of course
Cheers
Jon