Book Review: Web Standards Solutions

I've been looking for a good book on building pages with web standards, and Web Standards Solutions by Dan Cederholm fit the bill perfectly. This is not a reference book, but rather a collection of clear examples for creating pages. Topics covered include forms, anchors, printing and CSS layouts (i.e. non-table-based layouts).

One aspect of the book that is especially good is that each chapter is divided into a basic and an (optional) advanced section. So you can really get as much out of each particular topic as you need to. Also, each chapter shows multiple solutions for a particular problem. Usually the first solution is non-CSS. Then the author goes on to show more elegant solutions using CSS. This approach makes the case for web standards better than any abstract argument ever could. The reader can clearly see that doing things the standards way is better, but also understands other options that are available.

My only criticism (aside from the awful title) is that I would have liked an additional chapter on advanced layout techniques. If you're already a CSS Master, you won't need this book. But for anyone else doing HTML work, I highly recommend it.