Product Description

Ready to commit to using more CSS on your sites?  If you are a hands-on
learner who has been toying with CSS and want to experiment with real-world
projects that will enable you to see how CSS can help resolve design issues,
this book is written just for you! CSS master Eric A. Meyer has picked up
where Eric Meyer on CSS: Mastering the Language of Web Design left off.  He
has compiled 10 new, highly useful projects designed to encourage you to
incorporate CSS into your sites and take advantage of the design
flexibility, increased accessibility, decreased page weight, and cool visual
effects CSS offers.

Each project is laid out in an easy-to-follow, full color format complete
with notes, warnings, and sidebars to help you learn through example rather
than theory.  Some of the concepts covered include:

• Converting an HTML-based design to a pure positioning layout
• Styling a photo gallery
• Using background images to achieve cross-browser translucency effects
• Using lists of links to create tabs and drop down menus without the use of
  JavaScript
• Styling weblog entries, and placing them in a full-page design
• Creating a design for the CSS Zen Garden

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #269391 in Books
• Published on: 2004-04-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Amazon.com Review
Web designers loved Eric Meyer on CSS, which proved that a book could be both technically competent (it explained Cascading Style Sheets clearly) and aesthetically astute (printed in color, the book showed off Meyer's work brilliantly). More Eric Meyer on CSS picks up where the original book ended, going into detail on a score of important Web-design tasks. As he did with his first book, Meyer has had this one laid out in a broad-page format, with many illustrations, and printed in full color. The net effect is that readers see the design effects of the CSS tweaks under discussion, and there's no need to imagine (or load code) to see how colors and shadings look when rendered in a browser. Appealingly, this book is oriented around typical design projects (such as annual financial reports, weblogs, and personal homepages) and widely used design features (including menus and index tabs). This structure ensures the utility of Meyer's book--you can just turn to the chapter that deals with whatever you're trying to build, and see what the author did in a similar situation. Each section involves far more prose than code; Meyer is very careful to spend more time explaining what he's doing than he spends actually doing it, and the reader is never overwhelmed by giant CSS listings. Numerous screen shots intersperse the code and commentary, allowing you to see the intermediate results of style sheets in progress and adapt Meyer's beginnings in order to achieve different ends.--David Wall

About the Author

Eric A. Meyer has been working with the Web since late 1993 and is an internationally recognized expert on the subjects of HTML, CSS, and Web standards. A widely read author, he is also the founder of Complex Spiral Consulting (http://www.complexspiral.com), which focuses on helping clients save money and increase efficiency through the use of standards-oriented Web design techniques and counts Macromedia and Wells Fargo Bank among its clients.

Beginning in early 1994, Eric was the visual designer and campus Web coordinator for Case Western Reserve University Web site, where he also authored a widely acclaimed series of three HTML tutorials and was project coordinator for the online version of the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History combined with the Dictionary of Cleveland Biography (ech.cwru.edu), the first example of an encyclopedia of urban history being fully and freely published on the Web.

Author of Eric Meyer on CSS: Mastering the Language of Web Design (New Riders), Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide (O'Reilly & Associates), and CSS2.0 Programmer's Reference (Osborne/McGraw-Hill), as well as numerous articles for the O'Reilly Network, Web Techniques, and Web Review, Eric also created the CSS Browser Compatibility Charts and coordinated the authoring and creation of the W3C's official CSS Test Suite. He has lectured to a wide variety of organizations, including Los Alamos National Laboratory, the New York Public Library, Cornell University, and the University of Northern Iowa. Eric has also delivered addresses and technical presentations at numerous conferences, among them the IW3C2 WWW series, Web Design World, CMP, SXSW, the User Interface conference series, and The Other Dreamweaver Conference.

In his personal time, Eric acts as List Chaperone of the highly active css-discuss mailing list (http://www.css-discuss.org), which he co-founded with John Allsopp of Western Civilisation and is now supported by evolt.org. Eric lives in Cleveland, Ohio, which is a much nicer city than you've been led to believe, and is the host of "Your Father's Oldsmobile," a Big Band-era radio show heard weekly on WRUW 91.1-FM in Cleveland (http://www.wruw.org). When not otherwise busy, he is usually bothering his wife Kat in some fashion.

Customer Reviews

Superb book on CSS conversion
Eric Meyer has done it again. His self-titled sequel More Eric Meyer on CSS is a collection of ten conversion projects that teaches CSS by example. A practical alternative to his other new book, Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, 2d ed., More is more inspired how-to than dry reference. Meyer says that the ultimate goal is to "lure you into using more CSS" with tempting visual effects, improved accessibility, design flexibility, and reduced page weight. I asked Eric Meyer why he wrote this book:

"There was such positive response to 'Eric Meyer on CSS' that New Riders and I decided it would be fun to create a sequel. Both books share the same project-oriented, practical philosophy, which is what people really seemed to like - that and the full color printing! The hope is that the book will help more designers get to know and love CSS, and inspire them to take the concepts presented and do something really awesome."

Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman actually make standards sexy. Yes, by converting to CSS-based techniques you make your designs more flexible, accessible, and gracefully degrade, but you also lose wait, and gain pizzazz. Chapter 6 "CSS-Driven Drop-Down Menus," where Meyer shows how to create JavaScript-free nested pull-down menus, is worth the price of the book alone.

As you progress from project 1 through 10 Meyer takes you through more difficult CSS conversions. The first two chapters show you how to use CSS layout to convert conventional table-based designs into CSS-based layouts. Tables still have their uses however, and Meyer is not above styling table-based financial reports with CSS in project 3. Chapter 4 shows how to create translucency with positioned backgrounds. While the technique does a nice job of simulating the problematic semi-opaque PNG, Meyer points out the additional graphic overhead required for this technique.

Chapters 5 through 7 are the heart of the book, styling lists to create rollover, drop-down, and tab-based menus. Some of these techniques you may have seen before, documented by foreword writer Douglas Bowman and the aforementioned Zeldman. Meyer is the first to gather them all into one place and update them for CSS 2.1 and modern browsers (most version 5+ browsers). He takes you step by step through transforming simple unordered lists into line-straddling rollover menus, lightweight CSS-only drop-down menus, and variants of Bowman's "sliding doors" technique to create rounded tabs.

Chapters 8 through 10 take it up a notch, styling a weblog, a home page with weblog, and the CSS Zen Garden site. The Zen Garden project actually uses a PNG file that works with a full alpha channel in IE6/Win as well as IE5/Mac, Mozilla, Safari, and Opera. Chapter 10 in particular will be of interest to graphic artists who convert graphics comps into XHTML and CSS.

Starting with purely structural XHTML, Meyer shows you how to gradually build up your style sheets, adding effects with each iteration. Full color screenshots, notes, warnings, and websites annotate each tutorial with alternative methods, browser workarounds, and further reading. The net effect is like having a CSS master look over your shoulder as you convert existing web sites. You can take many of these techniques directly from the book and companion site (more.ericmeyeroncss.com) and put them directly into your sites, with some minor caveats.

Eric Meyer has arguably done more than anyone to help promote the use of CSS, and for that we applaud him. CSS is not just for styling text anymore.

Another superb effort
This is an excellent follow-up to "Eric Meyer on CSS." Meyer starts us in the same place as the original - turning an old-style table-based layout with font tags galore and showing how to trim the page size down using CSS for layout and formatting. The next 2 projects (Styling a Photo Collection and Styling a Financial Report) again hearken back to the original in that you are trying to complete a specific task. Along the way you are introduced to progressively more difficult concepts.

The gravy starts with Project 4 and continues through the rest of the book. Meyer leads us through some of the cutting-edge uses of CSS today and makes them work across today's popular browsers. When there is a problem rendering an effect in a particular browser, Meyer explains the pros and cons of using the technique.

This book is rated Intermediate-Advanced (same as the first book). Take that to heart. The projects in this book are harder than the corresponding project in the original. Neither teaches the basics. They make a great 1-2 punch and reading them in succession is a great idea. Make sure you follow along at the computer and do the projects - just reading them is helpful, but practice, practice, practice is absolutely necessary to really "get it".

Meyer again mentions that if you have read his previous books and don't like his writing tone, pass on this book. I find his writing style engaging. If you don't, consider getting the book anyhow - what you will learn from it should exceed any cringing you do at the style.

Pushing the envelope
Eric Meyer is pushing the envelope again. This book is interesting for those who wish to look ahead, and standards continue to develop because people like Eric Meyer do these kinds of things. However, if you are looking for a practical guide to making your own site, this is not the book for you.

Quite a few of the tricks and techniques expounded here do not work on the majority of browsers, and very little account of backward compatibility is evident. That is not a criticism of the book, which does what it set out to do in quite an extraordinary and admirable way. Be aware, though, that this book is not for the budding web author wanting to learn something about making pages that work today for the majority of visitors. Better is Eric Meyer's first book in this series, and better still is Eric Meyer's "Cascading Styling Sheets: The Definitive Guide" from O'Reilly.