Product Description

As the industry standard method for enriching the presentation of HTML-based web pages, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) allow you to give web pages more structure and a more sophisticated look. But first, you have to get past CSS theory and resolve real-world problems.

For those all-too-common dilemmas that crop up with each project, "CSS Cookbook" provides hundreds of practical examples with CSS code recipes that you can use immediately to format your web pages. Arranged in a quick-lookup format for easy reference, the second edition has been updated to explain the unique behavior of the latest browsers: Microsoft's IE 7 and Mozilla's Firefox 1.5. Also, the book has been expanded to cover the interaction of CSS and images and now includes more recipes for beginning CSS users. The explanation that accompanies each recipe enables you to customize the formatting for your specific needs. With topics that range from basic web typography and page layout to techniques for formatting lists, forms, and tables, this book is a must-have companion, regardless of your experience with Cascading Style Sheets.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #58713 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-17
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 538 pages

About the Author
Christopher Schmitt has been working on the Web since 1993. He is the principal of Heatvision.com, Inc., a new media design firm, and resides in Orlando, Florida. Christopher speaks frequently about web design at conferences including South by Southwest Interactive and Web Design World. His books include "Designing CSS Web Pages" (New Riders), "Professional CSS: Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design" (Wrox), and "CSS Cookbook" (O'Reilly).

Customer Reviews

Too many errors
Unfortunately, this book has too many errors, right from the very first chapter. It's unacceptable to have sample code that does not even match the description of the accompanying text, and output pictures that show something different than what the code actually does (ie: text is supposed to be displayed underlined in bold, and shows normal, when the point of the example is how to do that).

I'm returning it until they get a new corrected edition. It just pointless to spend time figuring out what the author really meant, I'd rather spend that time learning from another source.

How can a 2nd edition still have so many errors?!
In the past I've had confidence in the quality of books published by O'Reilly, but this book was a huge disappointment. There are so many errors--both typos and grammatical errors--coupled with awkward writing, that I find it almost unreadable. Even the diagram for the box model on page 67 is messed up. How is it possible that this sloppiness could get published (again!) in a second edition? There may be some valuable information in the book, but with all the mistakes I don't trust it as a resource. Look for authors Eric Meyers, Jeffrey Zeldman, and Andy Clarke for better CSS books.

A helpful companion book, with a few flaws
In general, this is a helpful book if you need to research a particular design solution, but it should in no way be used exclusively to learn CSS. It's helpful to have CSS and javascript experience to fully take advantage of everything this book offers.

Unfortunately, the book contains some organizational flaws. The "General" chapter, which is meant to serve as an introduction to CSS, is a brief background to concepts and tools, but it doesn't always point out that certain selectors are not supported in every browser (child selectors and pseudo-elements are the most notable). I think it'd be helpful to state straight-up that many aspects of CSS are interpreted differently in various browsers, if supported at all, and then note which browsers support each feature as the feature is introduced to the reader. To their credit, they do include a "pitfalls/warnings" icon at the end of some sections, but it'd be helpful to know about them before you continue on to work through one of their examples, only to discover later that it doesn't work in IE6. Since most people would like to design for a cross-browser experience, they might just want to skip over certain CSS features that are not widely supported, so indicating browser support up-front would be very helpful. And I wonder how valuable it is to mention something like "text-shadow" if it is only currently supported by one browser? In addition, some important concepts are buried in the book (such as the fundamental concept of inheritance and the !important rule) - they might be better placed in the "General" chapter (introduction).

Though this book does have its flaws, I have to say that it does assemble some nice formatting tricks. I have previously scoured the Web searching for many of the techniques that are all nicely packaged in one place in the "Images" chapter, so I am sure this would be a real time-saver for many, as the leg-work is already done for you. Among some commonly sought out techniques are rounded corners, dropshadows, and the lightbox effect. The "Lists" and "Navigation" chapters are also pretty useful. The "recipes" this book includes are not only a means to accomplish a particular goal, but the solutions are creatively achieved so that you start thinking about using CSS in less out-of-the-box ways. And kudos to them for mentioning accessibility/usability in the "Typography" chapter - those concepts often fall to the wayside in comparison to glitzier topics.