Product Description

This book is your indispensable guide to cutting-edge CSS developmentall you need to work your way up to CSS professional. You'll learn how to:

• Plan, organize, and maintain your stylesheets more effectively
• Apply the secrets of liquid, elastic, and hybrid layouts
• Create flickr-style image maps, remote rollovers, and other advanced CSS features
• Lay out forms using pure CSS
• Recognize common browser bugs, and how to fix them

While CSS is a relatively simple technology to learn, it is a difficult one to master. When you first start developing sites using CSS, you will come across all kinds of infuriating browser bugs and inconsistencies. It sometimes feels like there are a million and one different techniques to master, spread across a bewildering array of websites. The range of possibilities seems endless and makes for a steep and daunting learning curve. By bringing all of the latest tips, tricks, and techniques together in one handy reference, this book demystifies the secrets of CSS and makes the journey to CSS mastery as simple and painless as possible. While most books concentrate on basic skills, this one is different, assuming that you already know the basics and why you should be using CSS in your work, and concentrating mainly on advanced techniques. It begins with a brief recap of CSS fundamentals such as the importance of meaningful markup, how to structure and maintain your code, and how the CSS layout model really works. With the basics out of the way, each subsequent chapter details a particular aspect of CSS-based design. Through a series of easy-to-follow tutorials, you will learn practical CSS techniques you can immediately start using in your daily work. Browser inconsistencies are the thorn in most CSS developers' sides, so we have dedicated two whole chapters to CSS hacks, filters, and bug fixing, as well as looking at image replacement; professional link, form, and list styling; pure CSS layouts; and much more. All of these techniques are then put into practice in two beautifully designed case studies, written by two of the world's best CSS designers, Simon Collison and Cameron Moll. Summary of Contents:

• Chapter 1: Setting the Foundations
• Chapter 2: Visual Formatting Model Recap
• Chapter 3: Background Images and Image Replacement
• Chapter 4: Styling Links
• Chapter 5: Styling Lists and Creating Nav Bars
• Chapter 6: Styling Forms and Data Tables
• Chapter 7: Layout
• Chapter 8: Hacks and Filters
• Chapter 9: Bugs and Bug Fixing
• Case Study 1: More Than Doodles
• Case Study 2: Tuscany Luxury Resorts

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4244 in Books
• Published on: 2006-02-13
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 280 pages

About the Author
Andy is an internationally renowned web designer, developer and weblog author based in Brighton, England. Andy specializes in building attractive, accessible, and standards complaint web solutions. Andy enjoys writing about web techniques for sites such as digital-web.com and his work has been featured in numerous magazines, books, and websites around the world.

Simon is lead web developer at Agenzia, and has worked on numerous web projects for record labels, high-profile recording artists, and leading visual artists and illustrators, including The Libertines, Black Convoy, and Project Facade. Simon also oversees a production line of business, community, and voluntary sector web sites, and passionately ensures everything he builds is accessible and usable, and complies with current web standards. Simon regularly reviews CSS-based web sites for Stylegala, and does his best to keep his highly popular blog (collylogic.com) updated with noise about web standards, music, film, travels, and more web standards.

None Available

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Customer Reviews

Exceptional coverage of a difficult topic
I'm a software developer, not a web designer, so I don't use CSS on a daily basis. I've read a number of CSS books. This is the clearest, most practical presentation that I've run into. CSS is a surprisingly complex topic, particularly when you have to consider the real-world incompatibilities. For an intermediate presentation, this is an extremely well written, impressive book.

Truly Amazing! The best CSS book I've read and a great CSS Reference
This was the first CSS book that I purchased. I was always hesitant to purchase a book on CSS because most of the resources that I've found have been mostly beginner's tutorials or instruction and I felt that I had at least a "beyond beginner's" understanding of CSS. I wouldn't go as far as saying I'm an expert at CSS, but at least mid-level to advanced. However, this book had some previous good recommendations from amazon.com so I bit the bullet and bought it. I must say that I was NOT disappointed!

This book starts off with a very quick introduction/recap of CSS basics including good code structure and organization, validation, DOCTYPES, common selectors including IDs and classes, pseudo-classes, and the advanced selectors such as universal, child, attribute and more, and some wonderful reference on the specificity and inheritance, or the "Cascade", the core of CSS. Although this introduction is provided, it is relatively short at about 25 pages and I would suggest a good working understanding of these basics first, as it will help understand the rest of the book easier as opposed to trying to learn CSS for the first time from this book. The following chapter is another quick 15 pages with on "Visual Formatting Model Recap" including the Box Model and Positioning, two EXTREMELY important concepts to understand CSS properly. Although it is short, it is an extremely powerful section.

Chapter 3 finally jumps head first into the code with "Background Images and Image Replacement." With the movement towards "Web 2.0? websites, one of the most common features you'll see in these websites is rounded corners. These can be difficult to achieve successfully and the authors make it very easy. This chapter also touches on different drop shadows and image replacement techniques, which are useful for placing a logo in place but still having the text remain search engine friendly. Chapter 4 is a fairly short chapter on "Styling Links" with some interesting uses of attribute selectors.

Chapter 5 is all about "Stylig Lists and Creating Nav Bars" including the popular "Sliding Doors" popularized by Douglas Bowman of Stopdesign and first published in October of 2003 in A List Apart online magazine. During the section on creating nav bars, this chapter shows how to use CSS sprites for rollovers and visited links, something which I'll be blogging about soon. Chapter 5 also shows how you can use CSS to create image maps, something I've never even thought of doing with CSS.

The next two chapters are two of the best in the book I think. Chapter 6 deals with "Styling Forms and Data Tables", while Chapter 7 tackles "Layout". I think that styling forms properly can be one of the most difficult things to do in a website Chapter 6 shows some good tips and tricks to handle this properly. After all the chapters on styling elements, comes the final code chapter which deals with Layout and shows how to center designs, create two and three column layouts, and liquid, elastic, and hybrid (elastic-liquid), or fluid, layouts.

As any web designer knows, IE doesn't do the best job of displaying HTML and CSS properly according to the W3C. Fortunately, the last two chapters in the book are about "Hacks and Filters" and "Bugs and Bug Fixing", two excellent chapters for dealing with the countless IE CSS bugs. Finally, the last two chapters of the book are Case Studies that put everything together and take you through building two different web sites in a Web Standards way with CSS.

Overall, this is an excellent book, one I'd highly recommend to any web designer, or CSS developer, looking to expand their knowledge of the powerful language that is CSS. Definitely worth adding to your library. On an additional note, this book is published by Friends of Ed, a fantastic publisher of technical books, and one of my favorites. I currently own 8 books published by "Friends of Ed" and 2 more from their parent company Apress, all of which are excellent books.

Not for Beginners
This book has some useful information and is really targeted to the hardcore CSSers, who already know the basics (& a little bit more). It outlines clearly many topics and use some good examples (with some minor typos). If you are a beginner, I would not really recommend the book as it may overwhelm you with too technical stuff and exceptions. A good way in learning is not to provide exceptions at the beginning of a learning experience, but more towards the end. But that always happens with folks who know their stuff too well. So, get your basics and foundation right first, know about CSS and THEN go for this publication.