Not sure if this is taking place outside of California, but Starbucks is giving away free Tall-size coffee’s between 10AM and noon today only, so while I’m waiting for that ( two-minute walk from my apt door, and this makes it dangerous for me especially because of those crumblecake coffee cakes ), I figured I’d add a blog entry.

First, a warning: If you use Firefox to blog on Wordpress: always, always click Save before clicking the HTML button in case you want to make html edit changes. That small box that pops up, will make Firefox crash about 20% of the time.

Anyway, on the subject of CSS.


This particular language/standard was starting to feel like fire ants all over my body every time I needed to make some particular things work in the way I needed them to. And as soon as I thought it was working, I go to another browser (my alternative browser is I.E.), and it looks like some “digital thug” on the screen went over to the menu area and kicked them all over the screen! 

So I figured I’d better initiate an official learning project for CSS, once and for all.

Below I describe an unrelated “project”, but is related to my main point I’m making, that convinces me of the real value of making a decision to concentrate on a single thing:

A couple of months ago I sent away for a “home-version” of a traffic school, so that I wouldn’t have to sit for 8 hours in a physical class. No, it wasn’t internet-based, it was simply a packet full of workbook and test forms, that I would then send back to the vendor of this particular course after completing. This way - I thought - I could lounge on the couch while watching tv and do this traffic school thing on my own terms.

This proved a bad idea. Because I treated it so casually, I had to keep skipping answers, because I was sort of half reading the workbook for the solution.

I decided to dedicate the next morning, starting at 5am to get this traffic school course done. At the Kitchen Table with instrumental music, no pop or rock, no distractions
I cranked out the test in 3 hours (there was a lot to it), and got it completely behind me and sent it back to the traffic school test vendor, and got a 96%. I just wanted to pass, true, didn’t need the high score, but this hit home the backward-thinking I was guilty of.

I was actually extending the irritation by not treating it seriously. I was keeping this traffic school crap in my life, by fiddling around with it. I wanted it out of my life.
Just think of the value of getting up on a particular morning, and dedicating yourself to a subject you are interested in and which would give the gift of a lot of saved time!

This is why I brought up this subject of CSS. It’s time to master it so that I don’t have to waste time later. Yes, I could decide to just crank out the types of sites that don’t require a lot of aesthetics, but I’m a technical person by nature, so the addiction is already there to make use of newer technology, and if I continue half-assing my comprehension of it, I’ll end up with slurpee-style headaches.
Here are the non-affiliate link to two books I bought:

CSS Mastery

Bulletproof Web Design

(if you click the first one, both can be purchased at a group ‘discount’)

p.s. On that whole PHP subject, it’s practically a done deal. I had already learned C, so after reading Jason Gilmore’s great book, I’m definitely up and running. PHP adopted a LOT from C. The source code for this book will get you up and going even faster. There is a chapter where he provides an object oriented way of wrapping the php-sql functionality, so I’m using this code on a personal project I’m doing.

p.s.s. No, you don’t need to learn squat about C, in order to know, master and enjoy PHP.

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