This book is Part 2 of Teague’s introductory Dynamic Hypertext Markup Language (DHTML) and cascading style sheets (CSS) book [1]. I’ve come to rely on these books; they contain many excellent examples on how to best use JavaScript and CSS to implement basic Web page design features. The book is well written, and has good examples.

The target audience is Web designers who already have a basic understanding of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and who are interested in going to the next level in implementing page layout in CSS (as opposed to table-based layout), elegant navigation controls, and rudimentary server-side functionality in Extensible Markup Language (XML), PHP: hypertext preprocessor (PHP), and MySQL. Including server-side technologies in a book targeted at the client, however, does seem a little out of place. The book is not written to be a reference guide. While you will find a good explanation of each of the HTML tags, CSS properties, and JavaScript features used in the book, they are far from complete.

One downside of the book is that, like other Peachpit Press books I have read, this book has a verbose, hold-your-hand style that can, at times, feel a little patronizing and tedious. Every technique discussed in the book includes a “baby-step-by-baby-step” guide on how to implement the feature. Most of the time, I found myself jumping around the book, looking for new ideas, or just trying to remember where I found a particular DHTML technique that I had read about before, and then only reading the explanation if there was some aspect of the code that wasn’t obvious.

One nice thing is that this book is modestly priced when compared to other similar Web design books. The abundance of useful Web page design ideas and their implementations makes this book well worth the read.