As the owner of the first edition of the book, I immediately bought this 3rd Edition when I saw it available for Kindle. This would be a five-star book for someone who has taken the past five or ten years off from designing, but only warrants three stars as a current publication. Unfortunately the author (whom I admire and follow online) left a lot of material from the first edition intact. Thus probably 25% of the book is devoted to educating us on the downsides of designing web pages with table-based layouts, the examples of which are taken from websites dating back to 2005 in some cases. This was clearly a fresh perspective back then, heralding the approach of vastly superior CSS-based layouts, but is old news today. Spending the first pages of every chapter demonstrating why table-based layouts are inferior is essentially a waste of space. To his credit, he does provide CSS solutions to the problems detailed in the book, including some use of CSS3 for rounded corners, gradients, etc., but it seems a real opportunity was missed to spend more time on those solutions. All in all the book is solid in its information and advice, but devotes too much space to presenting and analyzing outdated practices. I hope the fourth edition will be a complete rewrite with more useful substance for present-day designers.
