For those of you wondering why I’ve still not been around much, here’s a little summary:

I bought my new computer on April 1. On April 8, I broke it while I was backing up my hard drives and trying to partition them in order to install OpenSuSE. On April 10, I called HP Tech Support. On April 13, they shipped me a box to pack my computer into and send off to them for repairs. April 15, I dropped the box at a FedEx drop-off location. April 17, I figured out that the FedEx drop-off location never shipped my computer, so I picked it back up. I then shipped it directly through a FedEx delivery person on April 18. April 20, my computer arrived at HP for repairs. It is now April 29, and I still have yet to receive any sort of word from HP as to how long it will take to get my computer fixed and sent back to me.

Needless to say I’m not all that impressed with HP’s customer support, but I guess it’s my own darn fault for trying to install SuSE without realizing that Vista doesn’t play nicely with Linux under normal circumstances.

(more…)

First off this book is not for beginners. To understand what’s going on, you’re going to need to know html, css, and a little bit of javascript. If you don’t know these things, this book will be hard, and maybe impossible to follow. The book starts off a dive right in approach, and doesn’t waste any time.

This book is good for someone who needs to learn a few specific things, that they can do with CSS. The book has 10 chapters and each chapter focuses on a new topic. This is the kind of book, where you don’t have to read through the whole thing, instead you can just pick a chapter, and learn about that specific topic.

There were a few notable chapters, which I’ll mention here, that will be of use to anyone who buys this book. The others may not be as useful, so I’ve refrained from mentioning them. The chapters I’m not going to talk have to do with custom borders, applying css to a webmail application, styling a web-based file viewer, and styling of a calendar.

The first chapter focuses on tabs. It goes through how to make tabs with css, and how to display different things in different things with different tabs, using iframes. It goes really in depth with the code, but there is little explanation of what’s going on after the code starts.

Chapter two is really the most basic, yet most useful and important chapters of the book. It is about multi-columned layouts. It goes over the code, and then talks about common errors that people run into. I really like how the author explains some of the things in this chapter.

In chapter three and four, the author goes through dynamic drop down menus. Chapter three goes over the basics of dropdown menus, basics of coding, and simple design elements. Then in chapter four, he moves on to more advanced features of dropdown menus.

Chapter five talks about slide shows. This is one of the things that I didn’t know how to do, prior to reading the book. The book did an ‘OK’ job on explaining the topic. I came out of it wondering a little bit about what I had just learned, and had to go back and re-read a few things to really get a grasp on things.

This book in my opinion didn’t really do a good job at getting some of the concepts across. That may be just be, but I think that to follow this book, with precision, you have to have a decent amount of experience in web development. I really don’t think that it’s worth the full $35, and you could find other books out there that help you far more, for a smaller price.

Product Rating:

Company:
Wrox / Wiley

Requirements:
n/a

Pricing:
$34.99

Reviewed by:
Jake Dahn

Competition:
n/a

Pros:
Supplies whole projects, that can be used in real world websites.

Cons:
The book is hard to follow, and it is mostly code, if you’re not already skilled with html, css, and javascript, this book is not for you.

Bottom Line:
If you want a book with whole projects, this is for you. Otherwise there are better options available.

I finally broke down and bought myself a new computer. After a long, hard road trying to figure out if it was worth it to try to upgrade my old box any further, I finally grew tired of all of the problems I was having. I did a lot of research looking into building myself a new box out of a barebones set up, and finally came to a scary conclusion. I don’t know jack-crap about computers anymore.

As I surfed various sites like NewEgg and TigerDirect, looking at all of the barebones packages they offered, I realized that I really had no idea what I was looking at anymore. I have not kept up at all with processor technology. I know nothing about all of the various types of RAM, or what to look for as far as power supplies, or really anything.

So, I admitted I had a problem, and put my life into the hands of a greater power–the guy at Circuit City that knew infinitely more about computers than I do.

(more…)