Book Review: Peter Gasston’s The Modern Web

Posted on by
Reply

tl;dr: Peter Gasston’s The Modern Web is a matter-of-fact compendium of essentially all of the relevant current (and some future) front-end web technologies. It’s hard to know something about everything, and it’s that fact that makes this book useful for designers and developers of all skill levels.

Peter Gasston knows a lot of stuff. In fact, he’s one of the three people I consider to be walking front-end encyclopedias. And that certainly shows in his newest book for No Starch Press.

In The Modern Web, Peter takes the role of a tour guide, or perhaps a weird variant of Dickens’ Ghosts of Christmas Present and Future, showing us pretty much all the front-end tech that’s worth knowing about right now. However, that’s a lot, which means he pretty much grabs you by the hand and pulls you through each of these technologies at top speed. This means the book is never boring: just when you get comfortable with a subject, whoosh! You’re on to the next one. It’s a perfect format for lightly touching on these subjects, each of which might be able to have a book of their own if one went into all the gory details. And he doesn’t shy away from really cool but barely-implemented W3C specs like Grid Layout, either. (Subliminal message from me: We want template syntax. Thanks.)

That’s the main strength of this book. You might know a lot about video, but nothing about SVG or localStorage. This book fixes that. You won’t become an expert in each of the subjects, but it’s surprising how much information Peter packs into each chapter. The book is not really big, but it’s dense. So dense, in fact, it’s easy to miss some of Peter’s dry sense of humor, and his hit-and-run insights, like this one, which is probably my favorite:

“Fast” is the only context that matters.

Brilliant.

The book’s structure is very clear. Each chapter contains a general discussion of a given technology, an introduction to the syntax, and examples. And he tops it all off with notes on browser support for each of the technologies discussed in the book.

This book must have taken an incredible amount of time to research and write, and I think Peter did a fantastic job of extracting the real essence of each spec and presenting it in an easy and quick to read format. Highly recommended for both novice and experienced readers.

Update from The Haystack

Posted on by
Reply

Well, hello there!

A lot has been going on around here, and the most important thing is arguably the fact that my book is now available. Responsive Design Workflow is now available through various booksellers, also via responsivedesignworkflow.com. The book, which is quicker and easier to read than it was to write, explains the whys and hows of my basic responsive web design workflow, which I have presented about these past couple of years. It was my privilege to work with some great people behind the scenes, including Mr. Responsive Ethan Marcotte (who wrote the foreword), Jake Archibald (who was kind enough to be my tech editor), and Ana Nelson (author of Dexy, the document automation tool I currently use in my work).

The book site/page, which I’m scrambling to complete, will contain errata (my publisher explained that everyone makes mistakes, not just me, so I’ve stopped torturing myself, kind of) and code examples. In fact, I’ve already put the code examples on GitHub so readers don’t have to be the victim of my insane calendar.

Krijn, PPK and I just finished the Mobilism conference, which according to PPK might just have been the last Mobilism ever. We’ll have to see how that works out. It was a fantastic event nevertheless. I presented about web-based mockups, which are an important part of the responsive workflow.

Coming up in several weeks is CSS Day, a one-day event with eight speakers, each of which will be presenting about a specific CSS module. It might not come as a surprise that I’ll be handling Flexbox, as the layout specs have been my favorite CSS topic since I first presented about them in 2009.

I’ll also be speaking at Generate in London, Breaking Development in Nashville, plus a couple of other worthwhile, yet to be announced events. Also in the works: Responsive Design Workflow workshops! Stay tuned.

As for writing, I’ve obviously found time to write everywhere but here: the book, a feature on style guides (with a tutorial on one method of creating and automating them) for .net Magazine, and I’m now a (generally) bi-monthly columnist for the Dutch industry magazine Webdesigner.

In parallel with the above, I’m still doing client work, although the amount of projects I can do is limited since I started working independently two-and-a-half years ago, which even now still takes some getting used to. I have difficulty with saying “no”, but a heavy workload is good training for that.

There’s a family life in there somewhere. Social life is on the to-do list. :)

Cheers,
Stephen

Say something nice (for a change)

Posted on by

With all of the recent discussions about how women in our industry are being treated, I started thinking about how many industry women have affected me somehow in a positive way. There are lots.

Here is a handful. These are women who have inspired me, advised me, offered me help or taught me things, mostly professionally but sometimes personally. They may not know this (they do now). I find each to be brimming with talent. They are smart, professional and just plain nice people. I feel lucky to know them and their work.

A tip of my invisible hat to (In no particular order):

No matter who you are, male or female, green or blue, you are on somebody’s list.

I can’t help but feel that someone, somewhere, will somehow turn this post into something bad. No, I have no ulterior motives for posting this. Nor do I need them.

Sometimes, it’s just important to say something nice.

Your turn. Have a good weekend.

PS: if you’re listed here and don’t appreciate that, please let me know and I will remove your name.