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Responsive Web Design

(A Book Apart #4)

Ethan Marcotte

4.13 · Rating details · 3,650 ratings · 223 reviews

From mobile browsers to netbooks and tablets, users are visiting your sites from an increasing array of devices and browsers. Are your designs ready? Learn how to think beyond the desktop and craft beautiful designs that anticipate and respond to your users’ needs. Ethan Marcotte will explore CSS techniques and design principles, including fluid grids, flexible images, and ...more

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Paperback, 150 pages

Published June 7th 2011 by A Book Apart (first published March 1st 2011)

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A Book Apart

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· 3,650 ratings · 223 reviews

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Sep 26, 2011 Elaine Nelson rated it it was amazing

Shelves: own, technology, non-fiction, favorites

A very short book; I think it took me an hour or so to read all the way through. BUT...it brings together all the threads of the Responsive Web Design concept in a clear and useful way. (He's self-deprecating about it, but the math for calculating a flexible grid's proportions based on a pixel grid is easy and just what I needed.) I ended the book fired up to do design this way from now on, and to go back and update sites I already have out there. Great color screenshots, easy-to-read code. And ...more

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Aug 07, 2011 Matt McClard rated it it was amazing

Silly comment reader, don't read this comment when you could be reading the book this comment is about. It's awesome and might change web development for the better for the rest of humanity and you are just wasting time reading a review that has little to nothing to do with it.

Seriously, go read the book. You could have already read the first page by now. ...more

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Sep 22, 2012 Jeb rated it it was ok

Ugh.
This book was uselessly beginnerish.
I can't imagine that anyone who'd pick this book up would be less than an intermediate Web designer. Beginners are way too focused on the functionality of their products to really think much of design beyond the basics. This book is targeted toward them and they're not going to read it. ...more

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Jul 11, 2012 Steve rated it it was amazing

Shelves: web-design-n-dev

Is it too soon to call this book seminal? A decade ago, Jeffrey Zeldman's Designing WIth Web Standards certainly fit that description, convincing many of us to drop our table-based layouts in favour of accessible, standards-compliant CSS layouts. By my estimation Ethan Marcotte's 'Responsive Web Design' looks set to become just as formative by calling for another new approach to designing websites - this time, one better suited to the ever-increasing number of devices and browsers that people us Is it too soon to call this book seminal? A decade ago, Jeffrey Zeldman's Designing WIth Web Standards certainly fit that description, convincing many of us to drop our table-based layouts in favour of accessible, standards-compliant CSS layouts. By my estimation Ethan Marcotte's 'Responsive Web Design' looks set to become just as formative by calling for another new approach to designing websites - this time, one better suited to the ever-increasing number of devices and browsers that people use to access the internet. This is an easygoing introduction to a new way of working - brief, clear and softened with Ethan's I-know-what-you're-thinking wit - a welcome ingredient, incidentally, given all the ingrained habits that may have to be unlearned.

If you're anything like me, you'll have resisted fluid layouts for as long as possible, feeling that a great-looking site only really looks best at one resolution: the one it was designed for. After all, the alternative - page elements lost in a sea of whitespace and line lengths too wide to be comfortably read, or content constricted into squashed-up columns, images cropped awkwardly or poking out where they shouldn't - well let's just say these have never been happy places for the designer pathological about presentation. Fortunately such concerns need no longer hold us back, thanks to that devastatingly useful W3C construct, the CSS media query. Layout approaching breaking point? No problem - set a break point. Adjust. And you're done.

This is a great little book, but it's worth stressing that Ethan makes the case for fully responsive websites using relative font sizes, fluid grids and flexible images, and also encourages a mobile-first approach to web design and agile development processes - things that may require a new mindset as much as a new workflow. There is, however, an opposing school of thought that says much of this is unnecessary and that adaptive layouts - ie. targeting specific devices or resolutions, perhaps using media queries to set break points for different fixed width layouts - is perfectly adequate. Although fine for some websites, I don't happen to think this is a particularly viable approach in the long term - nevertheless it would have been nice to have read a bit more about this in the book.

That said, even if you're more of an adaptive than a responsive person, this is still absolutely worth the read as it covers the nuts and bolts of what you'll need to know. It takes no more than a couple of hours, and it might convince you that going fully responsive isn't so drastic after all. ...more

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Jan 15, 2013 Graham Herrli rated it really liked it

Shelves: design-related

Finally a book written by a designer who can actually write. Ethan Marcotte has a lively style, supporting his statements with vibrant anecdotes, analogies, jokes, and concrete examples. He grounds the book in traditional architecture and art history just enough to give it depth without detracting from its focus of responsive web design.

My favorite quotation from the book is:

Pretend for a moment that you're working as a front-end developer. (If you're already a front-end developer, well, prete

Pretend for a moment that you're working as a front-end developer. (If you're already a front-end developer, well, pretend you're also wearing a pirate hat.)

...which probably gives a fairly good sense of the author's style.

One thing that bothered me was that images of different sizes were displayed next to each other at the same size in the book, even though the points being discussed were directly caused by the difference in size.

Some things I learned from this book are:
(view spoiler)[
* When creating a flexible grid, the percent size for margins scales based upon the context of the parent element whereas the percent size for padding scales based upon the context of the element it modifies.

* You can texture the backgrounds of two columns simultaneously by using a large horizontal image with a division between the two textures. If the division is 60% of the way across the image, the CSS for this would be something like:

background: #ddd url("columns.png") repeat-y 60% 0;

* Media queries can be included directly in the stylesheet links, like:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="wide.css" media="screen 
 and (min-width: 1024px)" />

* To correctly get the size of some mobile phone screens, you first need to set their widths to be the actual width of their rendering surface, like:

<meta name="viewport" content="initial-scale=1.0, width=device-width" />

* You can get older browsers to support basic width media queries using Respond.js.

* The jQuery $.get() function is great for inserting in additional content from an external HTML file so that browsers that don't support JavaScript won't display that content, but browsers that do will be enhanced by it.

* By designing for smaller sites and progressively enhancing, you reduced the bandwidth strain upon smaller devices by loading smaller images. You also ensure that you understand from the start what the most essential parts of the site are.
(hide spoiler)] ...more

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Aug 29, 2011 Corey Capetillo rated it liked it

I've just finished going through the book and it's examples. It's quite handy in that it's collected several techniques for building a 'responsive' layout design. However, only look to this book for theory and history. This is NOT a step-by-step guide in building a responsive site from scratch. Previous experience in HTML, CSS, and Javascript is highly recommended.

See, this book has been written like many of the web development (html/css/js/php) tutorials you can find online by simply performing I've just finished going through the book and it's examples. It's quite handy in that it's collected several techniques for building a 'responsive' layout design. However, only look to this book for theory and history. This is NOT a step-by-step guide in building a responsive site from scratch. Previous experience in HTML, CSS, and Javascript is highly recommended.

See, this book has been written like many of the web development (html/css/js/php) tutorials you can find online by simply performing a Google search. And this book, like those tutorials, sometimes rushes through topics and skips over details, becoming nothing more than code snippets surrounded by hastily written paragraphs.

Where this book sets itself apart, is in it's EXCELLENT job of referencing many of those ground-breaking tutorials (articles) that have helped Ethan Marcotte give content to this book. Links are provided and you're encouraged to go back and read these articles, where you can return to the book with a better understanding of the groundwork laid before this publication.

Unfortunately, like those online tutorials it's also loaded with inconsistencies and gaping holes that will have you backtracking several paragraphs (and pages) to soon realize that the author is simply referring to points that he never actually made. And this is all without a comment section to contact the author for clarification and article refinement.

And at $18.00 + Shipping & Handling, with only 150 pages (including appendix, reference list and a page about the author), I find this book to have been over priced. I expected more. a LOT more. I may question my purchase, but I don't regret it. At the very least, someone may read this review and consider doing what I should've done from the get-go and simply Google "Responsive Web Design -book +article". I've purchased the other books in the series (I got them all at once) and I suspect I will have similar disapointed feelings about them as well. Meh...

If you're looking for something ground-breaking, thorough, well-written and worth your dirty dollars, look elsewhere. If you're looking for a convenient reference of information freely available on the internet because you're too busy to Google it yourself, then I suppose you've found your book. ...more

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Jun 24, 2011 Stringy rated it really liked it

Recommends it for: front-end web developers

Like all the previous items from A Book Apart, this is concise, useful and finds room for a little humour too. This one is about making websites that will cope with the multitude of different browser sizes and contexts web developers have to deal with these days.

I've read almost all the articles Marcotte references, and had started using some of the principles before beginning this book. But Marcotte brings them altogether in a way that has thoroughly convinced me to give up on merely elastic la ...more

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Oct 07, 2012 Ani rated it really liked it

Shelves: a-book-apart

This book makes you fully understand responsive design. Easy to read, humorous and full of valuable information. It's perfect for anyone who wants to build a new responsive website. ...more

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Dec 07, 2018 Deena Katma rated it really liked it

For beginners in web design.. This book represent basics and concepts in build responsive web pages.

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Dec 27, 2012 Adam Wiggins rated it really liked it

Responsive web design is the idea that, when creating a web page, it should work seamlessly and correctly on all screen sizes and devices, from an iPhone or Android phone up through a widescreen desktop computer. But with so many computing devices available today (and many more coming in the future), you can't hope to customize the experience for each device.

Instead, the page's HTML, CSS, and Javascript should adapt to the device's reported capabilities. This book uses an example site to demonst ...more

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Nov 20, 2012 Krzysztof Ostrowski rated it really liked it

I found the whole book particularly interesting and believe anyone web-business-related can benefit from reading it.

Why I find it interesting? Because:

1. The book is technical enough for dev people not to get bored when reading, but covers all the fundaments: fluid coding (em, %), media-queries, progressive enhancement rather than degradation. (Chapters II - IV)

2. The book is not technical to much for designers - going through 'technical' part of the book gives design-heads an idea of what dev ...more

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Oct 13, 2012 Reido rated it it was amazing

Web design is a field that's always progressing with time. And as a web designer it might seem intimidating. Because new standards are brought into play every 3 years, of even sooner. So it's a field that in which reinventing your self is is not an option. This book goes over the new creative method for designing websites that's sustainable for creating pages for all different devices. I would say if your feeling alarmed about approaching this new coding method. Don't be. Ethan Marcotte makes hi ...more

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May 07, 2015 Davy rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: design

(3.5) Finally finished this book again! When I had read this the first time, I didn't notice the bit regarding working with engineering collaboratively, but I appreciated the recommendation to get to a live prototype in code and iterate the design with engineering, rather than spinning your wheels in a design tool.

This was a good updated primer for RWD, but I think the Responsible Responsive book has more tactical knowledge for engineers looking to implement responsive designs. ...more

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Oct 25, 2016 Phat Nguyen rated it it was amazing

This is one of the best books to start learning about responsive web design. What makes it great is that it's not just a technical book on how to apply HTML and CSS to create responsive websites, it discuss the history, the principles and motivation behind the RWD movement, as well as providing numerous links to other excellent articles about this topic.

After finishing this book I feel much more motivated to dig deeper and research about this topic. ...more

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Jun 13, 2011 Jason Zimdars rated it really liked it

Highly recommended. Along with HTML5 For Web Designers, it is easily the best of "A Book Apart" offerings. It's a quick read with concrete examples – you can start using what you learn here immediately. It is well written and even funny at times. ...more

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Dec 02, 2014 Kevin rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2015-reads

A really well written and thoroughly illustrated conceptualization of responsive web design. This is a book for coders and non-coders alike that provides ammunition for the fight to redevelop organizational websites that can be accessed device nonspecifically. A very good read if you're in the throes of working on a new website and would like it to function universally. ...more

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Dec 26, 2011 James Cridland rated it it was amazing

I don't normally buy books like this, but this is a great tutorial into proper responsive web design; very well written and simple to understand. I've not finished it - because halfway through everything kind of "clicked" and I could do the job I wanted to do. I'd recommended it. ...more

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Jan 05, 2012 Ricardo Rocha rated it it was amazing

Shelves: web-development

Great book, It helps to understand why Responsive web design is important now a days, and gives some code that helps understand the concept and implementing the idea.

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May 21, 2012 Paul rated it really liked it

A good overview of responsive design; however, when you got to the end and the issue of mobile-first design arose, it felt a little as if the rest of the book took you to a partial dead end.

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Jan 21, 2018 Ahmad Alfy rated it it was amazing

This is indeed a must read for front-end developers and web designers as well. The practices applied within this book have been standards for so many years and we've been following them already. The book helped me explain to my fellow designers about the philosophy behind RWD and how can we effectively produce a responsive design with less iterations and frustration. Before sharing this book with the designers I used to work with we used to struggle with their intention to always have a perfect ...more

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Jul 25, 2018 Venkatesh-Prasad rated it really liked it

The book provides a good peek into responsive web design via CSS3 and HTML5. While it covers fluid layout and media queries, it is more introductory. If you are looking for either a deep dive into concepts, terms, and nuances or a how-to guide for various situations, then this is not the book. If you are looking for an introduction to fluid layout and media queries, then this is the book; however, I wished the author would have gone into more details about the dynamics/interaction between fluid ...more

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Nov 05, 2020 YashaaGlobal rated it it was amazing

One of the good reads. First time this book, I was able to see the code through the eyes of designer. It's a fun read and quick read too. I was so impressed with this book that I added this book on the list of required reading for YashaaGlobal library, especially for our new Web Designers, According to our library review this is one of the best addition for our Web Design Jacksonville ...more

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May 13, 2020 Anna Kieu rated it it was amazing

I have been doing web sites for over a decade. I had a good knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I wanted to improve my skills for creating web sites that would scale well across devices and screen sizes. This book showed me by example the principals needed to accomplish my goals. The book goes step-by-step to teach each principle. https://proweb365.com/
...more

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Jun 24, 2017 Albert Dong rated it really liked it

Shelves: self-help

Very quick read but 150 pages for 3-4 main points is a bit excessive. On the plus, each one of those points is heavily reinforced and plenty of examples are given for each. Great intro book towards responsive web design

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Aug 11, 2018 Michael Mali rated it it was ok

There are some important principles contained in this book as it relates to responsive web design, but ultimately, a lot of what it taught were things I inherently understood anyway. As technology has evolved, this book has become slightly out of date.

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Dec 15, 2018 Fatih Tirki rated it really liked it

Very useful info for beginner, avarage spelling, clear language, technical details are also useful to make responsive website. Good, my developer just changed some from book at https://www.medyator.net ...more

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Sep 01, 2019 Tony rated it it was amazing

A great book from the guy who, in my opinion started the whole responsive web design movement. After reading Ethan’s blog post on RWD, I was hooked.

The book is short and concise. Highly recommend reading this if you are just starting out.

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Jan 21, 2021 Rozarka rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction

Although some techniques described in the book are a bit dated (or outright obsolete) now, the overall approach and the way of thinking about designing for different devices and various users are still relevant and the book is a solid starting point for beginner coders.

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Jun 12, 2018 Courtney Jordan rated it it was amazing

Father of responsive design - 'nuff said. Great book ...more

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Nov 06, 2018 Danny de Vries rated it it was amazing

Shelves: aba

Still relevant. Period.

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