Books and web pages

The internet can be so useful when you’re trying to solve a problem. The other day I was trying to import video footage from our new camcorder into iMovie. The camcorder records in true widescreen but although you can apparently setup a new movie in iMovie to use the ‘DV Widescreen’ format, connecting the camera instantly changed the settings to standard DV and all the images were coming in squashed. Nothing worked. I looked on the internet and eventually came across a posting by someone who’d had the same problem, and managed to solve it. He’d gone to the Apple Store and spent ages with them there, and eventually they’d discovered that setting the framerate to the non-standard 25fps would trigger iMovie into accepting widescreen input properly. I’m sure I would have spent many frustrated hours before I’d come acdross that solution, so it saved me a lot of hassle. It really shows how useful the internet can be

On the other hand, I’ve recently been going through some books on CSS and Javascript: specifically CSS Mastery by Andy Budd and DOM Scripting by Jeremy Keith. These are both really good books if you’re into web design and it struck me that books can be a lot better than the internet for learning stuff.

I’ve tended to pick up most of my knowledge of CSS by trial and experiment, and by reading a lot of online tutorials and posts. Sites like A List Apart are really good for this kind of stuff. But although when I first ordered the books I feared they might be a bit too simple, as I was reading them I found that there were quite a few basic holes in my knowledge. Maybe the task of writing a book forces the author to be really thorough and systematic.