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The odd thing about most things in life is how when you set off to do something, inevitably other things present themselves that have to be done first and before you can get on with what you really wanted to do in the first place.

This is exactly what has happened to me recently but in a rather odd way over web site design and something called CSS which stands for Cascading Style Sheets the basic principles of which are very good but the “detailed explanations” from the experts very far from clear and one wonders why ? True if I wanted to do a simple web site, I could just create one using a template from within Adobe Dreamweaver and it would take care of the style sheet but sadly, I need more than just that…

I Like Reference Books

As someone who was self taught on IT in the dark days of DOS and being someone bought up on using books for reference on most topics. It therefore follows that I am an avid reader of technical books and a great fan of Amazon who single handedly reduced the price of technical computer books from an average approaching £50 a time, to £30 or less when they entered the market.

Experience taught me early on that if you really wanted to “crack any topic”, you needed to buy several books on the same subject, written by different people because with a bit of luck, what one author forgot to mention, another might. In fact on very technical topics, I have been known to buy up to 5 different books and worth every penny too.

I Am Not Academic

I have never had an academic brain that sought knowledge for knowledges sake, I am practical and any information I want is to help me deal with one project or another so when approaching anything new, what I’m after first is the “Concept”, what is it, what does it do and why.

These days mainly, books on computer applications like Photoshop, MS Office and so on are pretty good in that they will follow a step through process of showing what can be done with the program and how to do it. In a way, this should be the case because the program will have menus and processes built in which are pretty logical, if the author is any good, the design of the program set against the background of what most people will want to do with it so writing a good “How to Book” shouldn’t be that difficult.

Having said that, there are some programs like 3D design and animation, full scale DTP that are highly complex in their own right with amazing user potential so for these, writing a book could be more difficult to say the least. By and large I suspect that people who can do classroom training where you interact with “students”, if they wanted to, could write a book on the software they teach, given the personal motivation to do so.

Official User Manuals

A dozen years back, every piece of software came with a user manual. These were written by Lord knows who, were universally awful and so totally useless that they were responsible for the creation of the third party books we have today. There are very few programs that you can buy today that come with any meaningful printed documentation, on-line help is about all you get.

These original manuals were so awful that the game in IT was always to see how far you could get with using a new program without breaking the shrink wrap on the manual, the biggest put down was “RTFM – Read the *ucking manual !” Mind you if you ever did, the contents if not obscure were often banal and I can remember one classic in a Microsoft manual aimed at IT Systems Administrators that included: “If this happens, please contact your Systems Administrator.” !!!

However fond and admiring of the Open Source software movement, whether Linux or any particular program that runs on it, the documentation is universally awful and obscure. In part I have no doubt that for some, keeping things obscure and shrouded in mystery is a deliberate ploy, I have met many such people in the IT Business over the years.

The real problem though I suspect is that when you start approaching any kind of scripting or programming, you hit the “geek wall” and its a difficult one to deal with because you are very definitely in the “Those who can do, those who can’t, teach”. Good programmers are a very strange breed indeed and you can almost tell the best from the worse by the amount of “code comments” or lack thereof – most good programmers just don’t bother commenting.

Commenting Code

For those who are interested code comments are roughly as follows: Any program consists of a list of instructions a bit like a recipe, “do this, then that and afterwards…” However modern programs are not linear as in reading from the top to the bottom of a list, they interact with the users and will therefore jump around from one block of code to another depending on what is happening.

In a program consisting of thousands of blocks of code, it obviously makes sense to stick a note in that the program ignores whilst running, that says /* This block of code does this…. */ It makes sense for long term maintenance and upgrade of any program where a different team of programmers may be working on it 5 years later.

Cascading Style Sheets

Full circle, back to where I started. CSS is essentially a scripting process but what it does is separate the presentation or ‘look’ of a web site from its content and as an example, this blog site is run by CSS so that I can write what I like (the content), on a word processor, upload it and it will be visually formatted by the style sheet giving a consistent look to all entries.

There are a whole number of reasons why I want to “nail CSS down” but I am horrified by just how badly the various books I have read, approach the subject. That they know what they are on about I’m sure is true but communicating that is totally another matter, they just don’t do it effectively and the main reason is because they are not asking themselves a simple question: “If I was starting to learn CSS today, what would I want to do with it ?”

Dissipating my concentration and efforts is always a danger because I am naturally interested in a wide range of topics but in this case and in order to achieve my own goals with CSS, I have had to start making notes and sketches to make sense of various issues using the books I have and looking at the various free web tutorials available. I suspect that by the time I’ve finished I will end up with an inter-active electronic book on the subject and if so, that might be a saleable item and why not, we shall see.

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