This book is a great resource for intermediate web designers or developers. It walks you through the development of several very simple responsive website examples, with topics like preloading content covered early in the book.The book does note the experience levels expected, in some places. You should be comfortable with basic PHP and JS, in addition to HTML and CSS. The adaptive images example cites as "self-explanatory" code that you find when you open a PHP file. For beginners this will probably be kind of scary, especially if they've seen a syntax error before.So for beginners, the more advanced coverage might feel like too high of a bar. But for intermediate or advanced-level developers, that is the kind of thing that differentiates this book from the many beginner texts in a valuable way. Even if a lot of the coverage in this book was brief, it gave me an easily-digestible overview that helps me understand 1) when I would use a specific method, 2) why I would use it, and 3) how I would start down that path. Emphasis on the "start" because this is not an in-depth book.The biggest letdown for me, and the reason I'm deducting the first half of a star in this review, is this: When the book started to go into Angular JS and CodeIgniter, I thought it was a pleasant surprise and even got a little excited. The "section" on CodeIgniter even makes this statement: "This section goes by the assumption that you have experience using PHP and have also connected to a database before, as this will not guide you through the steps to do so." Wow, exciting! I'm ready. BUT: This is followed by absolutely no information on CodeIgniter or its role in the Responsive Design process. The book never mentions CodeIgniter again. Huh? Admittedly CodeIgniter and AngularJS content does feel like a lot to expect of a book on responsive design, but if you say you're going to deliver, you should deliver.The other half-star deduction comes from the Retina displays section. The information on Retina displays is extremely brief and not high quality, and while the code snippet listed was one I hadn't seen before, I couldn't immediately think of a way to put it to use. I can't emphasize how important it is for a modern website to support high-DPI graphics, and the techniques are not really that lengthy.Regarding the lack of deep coverage: I felt this was a strength. I am an intuitive learner and really appreciate a good high-level overview. I felt that this was one of the book's biggest strengths.There were also some great third-party resources covered in the book that I hadn't come across yet after building responsive sites for 4 years.If you are getting advanced with HTML and CSS, and want to expand your practical javascript toolset a bit more, this book might be a good way to do that. Some very helpful JS snippets are included, and they are brief enough that you probably won't wear yourself out with coding fatigue.Finally, it wasn't major, but I noticed some confusing English text in the differentiation between LESS and SASS. "Some only need to have Python installed..." huh?Overall: Even considering the negatives, for me there is just too much valuable content in this book to rate it lower than four stars--I know I'll refer to parts of it next time I work on a professional project, and that's easily worth the price to me. But please note that I purchased this book during a big sale on the publisher's website and felt like it was a great deal especially considering the cost.Note: I was contacted by Packt, who noticed I purchased the book and offered a reward in exchange for an unbiased review.

This is a very thin book, which combined with Dewald Els’s easy to read, “chatty” style, makes this a book you can finish in a single evening.The question though, is whether you would want to.There is no depth to this book. Dewald rushes past each topic, devoting no more than a paragraph to things such as Angular, SASS, progressive enhancement, etags, compression and minification.If you want to learn about Responsive Design, then you will have to look elsewhere. There is no more than a page or two in total of real information here – mostly involving media queries.In most cases Dewald briefly describes a topic, then provides a link and tells you to go and read about it elsewhere.There is a very simple code example in chapter two, just two divs and two css classes, but the two don't match up! It's not hard to figure out what he ment to say, but you do start to wonder about the quality of his work.In chapter 3, he suggests embedding html within strings in the javascript code, as a way of ensuring that the dom elements are only loaded if the screen width is wide enough. I would suggest that this is not best practice as it's a maintenance nightmare!Chapter seven starts with the words: “You’re still here!”. Is the author expecting that any normal reader would have given up by now?I expect that most readers would find the detailed description of how to create sprites (one of the few topics that is described in detail) to be tedious, and not anything that an average web developer wouldn’t already know.This is not the Responsive Design book you are looking for.