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Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Suffering from chronic idiocy since 1977

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Dvorak’s Cry For Help

Writ­ing has a way of cut­ting you off from the out­side world. At least, that’s what I’ve expe­ri­enced these last few weeks as I’ve been dig­ging into my lat­est project for Apress, so I can under­stand (at least to a degree) how it is pos­si­ble for such a pro­lific author as John C. Dvo­rak to not have heard of the many avail­able resources for learn­ing Cas­cad­ing Style Sheets, thus result­ing in his recent frus­tra­tion with CSS.

Now, as I myself have only become aware of Dear John’s con­ster­na­tion (due, of course, to my head being stuck inside a Word doc­u­ment — let’s not even talk about me not hear­ing about the whole Cas­tro power switch, liv­ing in South Florida and all…), I felt that it is my duty as a respon­si­ble mem­ber of the CSS com­mu­nity to help out in some way, albeit a few days behind every­one else.

So, John: See­ing as it is purely a mat­ter of edu­ca­tion (or lack thereof), after con­sult­ing with Simon, Jeff, and Ian, it has been decided to pro­vide to you, free of charge, copies of our most recent books: Begin­ning CSS Web Devel­op­ment (Simon’s new book, and which I had the plea­sure of Tech­ni­cal Edit­ing) and Pro CSS Tech­niques (by the “3 CSS Mus­ke­teers” Jeff, Ian and myself). When read in order (start­ing with the “begin­ners” book is a safe bet) these will give you all the knowl­edge you need to over­come your deep-seated fear and loathing of CSS.

We’ll send them to you as soon as the ink is dry, and all for the cost of send­ing an note to any one of us with your mail­ing address. We’re wait­ing for you, John.

This item was posted by Dan Rubin on Monday, August 7th, 2006.

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9 comments on “Dvorak’s Cry For Help”

  1. Posted by Jina Bolton on Monday, August 7th, 2006.

    “you need to over­come your deep-seeded fear and loathing of CSS”

    And that’s exactly what his post exuded… fear. I hope he takes up your offer. :)

  2. Posted by Chris Griffin on Monday, August 7th, 2006.

    I noticed you, Jeff, and Ian are the authors, but why did they feel the need to exclude you and Ian and give Bryan Veloso credit on the actual cover. He’s so rebel­lious and wreck­less that doesn’t even sup­port IE6 on his own website! :)

    Any­ways I wish this book was around about 2 years ago, It would of really helped. I’m sur­prised a (good) beginner’s guide to CSS hasn’t came along ear­lier than now, no won­der peo­ple think the web stan­dard­is­tas are elitists…haha

    If this book can teach Dvo­rak CSS, then you’ll know that this book will be suc­cess­ful. Good Luck.

  3. Posted by Lea on Tuesday, August 8th, 2006.

    I think Molly beat you to it :)
    http://www.molly.com/2006/07/27/dear-john-dvorak/

  4. Posted by Dan Rubin on Tuesday, August 8th, 2006.

    Chris: It’s yet another ploy by Veloso to get his name known around the world.

    Lea: I know :) In fact, there’s a link to her offer in my post (see: “Dear John” in the text). Before read­ing her post, I had the same idea, but then it mor­phed into an offer from the 4 of us to just send him our books :)

  5. Posted by Matthew Anderson on Thursday, August 10th, 2006.

    Genius! Dvorak’s mar­ket­ing tac­tics are get­ting old. This is a great alter­na­tive to writ­ing an enraged blog post (which is exactly what he is look­ing for). Good luck!

  6. Posted by Quentin on Monday, August 14th, 2006.

    To the defense of Mr. Dvo­rak, it is kindof a sur­prise to see just how easy all the cool new web page stuff is to do. Been learn­ing (through dig­ging through Mr. Rubins code) some of the ways mod­ern web cod­ing works. Ya but the fact is that he is a man with a following…a lot of peo­ple read his stuff!! Still, I\‘d say cut him some slack.

    [Edited by Dan to remove non-related polit­i­cal state­ment — please keep com­ments on-topic]

  7. Posted by Joel on Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006.

    So if Bryan wasn’t an author, how’d he get his name there?

  8. Posted by Dan Rubin on Thursday, August 24th, 2006.

    Ah, Joel, that’s the trick to fig­ure out, now isn’t it… ;)

    Bryan was an author orig­i­nally, but cir­cum­stances pre­vented him from work­ing on the book, thus Ian and I were enlisted to round out the team…

    Or you could just say that he’s a mad Amazon.com hacker with Pho­to­shop skillz. ;)