Styling Web Pages with CSS: Visual QuickProject Guide, by Tom Negrino and Dori Smith
This book offers a very quick introduction to CSS. 
The book starts with the basics – rules, selectors, classes, IDs, the cascade, internal and external style sheets, Divs, boxes, floats, padding, margins – everything is covered, both in a very basic manner. Next are styling elements, working with images, menus and navigation, and moving styles from internal to external style sheets. Rounding out this project-based guide is working with browsers, both old and new, and debugging CSS.
Styling Web Pages with CSS is very succinct and to the point. However, there are some minor mistakes in it, and there are lots of things that are not explained – so while most of the recommendations in the book work, it is very hard to understand why, and the book provides very little in the way of recommendations for where to go to learn more about particular topics or find more in-depth information.
I would consider this book an introduction for people liking to learn visually. However, it has limited value at all beyond the very first introduction. Generally I would say that this is one of the weaker Visual QuickProject books, and it was not as good as I had expected it to be.
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.Audacity, Privateer Out of Portsmouth, by J. E. Fender
Filed under: book review, historical fiction, J. E. Fender
This is an interesting nautical fiction novel by J.E. Fender. This is the second volume of the Frost Saga, the story of one Geoffrey Frost, a mariner from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, who is a great navigator,
Geoffrey Frost has entered the American Revolution on behalf of the colony of New Hampshire, commanding a captured British sloop o’ war and sailing out of Portsmouth to harass the British fleet. And as Frost doesn’t like to waste time, the story about him too moves fast, with little time spent ashore and lots of nautical action compared to most of the novels about naval warfare in the age of sail.
The story in Audacity, as in the first book in the series, is set during the American Revolution. Here Frost and his crew engage an English frigate very smartly, destroy another English Navy ship, and capture several British trading and supply ships. For Frost and his crew, that means a very nice sum in prize money, and it also serves to enhance Frost’s reputation and influence.
Audacity is very entertaining, rich on historical detail, and has great descriptions of the naval actions the ship engages in. The weakest part of the book is in the exceedingly conceited manner of behavior of the some of the characters, most notably Frost himself. He speaks as if he was reading from a government document or the small print clauses in an insurance policy. I think it is fairly unlikely that anyone ever stood on a quarterdeck and emitted any of the pompous speeches that Geoffrey Frost is guilty of.
Overall, I view Audacity as a very nice read, entertaining, and quite interesting as it deals with the Civil War and the emerging navy of the US. And I enjoy ther hero, the smart and brave Geoffrey Frost a lot!
Praise:
“This entertaining novel .. offers historical detail .. plenty of action, and unforgettable characters.” —Booklist
“The battle scenes are plentiful, the historic references neatly woven in ..”—Concord Monitor
“A seafaring yarn of the American Revolution, Audacity plunges into action and claps on sail.”—The Historical Novels Review
.The Disciple, by Stephen Coonts
Filed under: bestseller, book review, espionage, military fiction, Steven Coonts, Thriller
Iran is weeks away from having operational nuclear weapons. Closer, in fact, than the CIA believes. It seems to have every intention of using 
CIA’s Chief of Operations for the Middle East is former Navy admiral Jake Grafton. He knows something is going on, and assigns his best operative, Tommy Carmellini, to work inside Iran. Tommy starts gathering information, and is assisted by a group of dissident Iranians. They are afraid their leader may start a new world war.
Eventually, the facts are on the table. And they are much worse than suspected. Iran has nearly completed production of a dozen nuclear warheads. But the American President refuses to strike Iran first. As he sees it, a broad strike on Iran will be the beginning of the third world war. Instead it will be up to Grafton and Carmellini to stop the disaster from occurring. The countdown to Armageddon has started. Can it be stopped?
Tommy Carmellini, the main character in a recent series of books by Stephen Coonts, has worked with Jake Grafton on a number of missions. He is a retired jewel thief that has been turned into a somewhat reluctant CIA operative. He is a very smooth, careful, intelligent and highly adaptive man who has just the kind of skill set that is required for deep undercover work.
In The Disciple, Stephen Coonts returns to the kind of military and espionage story that he is great at, and that made some other novels, like Cuba, very successful novels. This is a good move by Coonts. He knows how to tell a suspenseful tale of skillful military action and undercover technology.
The Disciple had me pinned to my chair. It is Coonts at his best again. A great book!
The Disciple is a tense and fast-paced thriller, starting with the opening sequence of the Israeli destruction of a Syrian nuclear plant. It never slows down. A great book for fans of military and espionage thrillers. One I recommend.
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