Customer Reviews

The Art and Science of CSS

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The Art and Science of CSS was a quick read (208 pages) and packed full of valuable code examples. Unlike other CSS books that teach you the specifics of CSS with vague examples (not vague in a bad way), this book teaches you specific examples and gives you extra resources. This book is somewhat of a `cookbook` of commonly used CSS methods. Each author brings their unique writing style to the table, and each chapter focuses on a specific aspect of design and its CSS and styling methods.

Chapter 1 stars with Headings. The author of this chapter gives a brief introduction to hierarchy and branding, and how you can achieve more control with your look and typography. As typography is discussed, he moves on to talk about image replacement and the many techniques available to us today. There is no perfect solution when it comes to image replacement, but the author does a great job of showing current methods, their advantages, and their disadvantages (including an in-depth section on sIFR).

Chapter 2 is all about Images. The author starts by showing you how to create a basic, but aesthetically pleasing, image gallery. The task at hand is to create the enlarged version, the thumbnail page, and the galleries page while keeping the markup lean and semantic. Each of these are put together very nicely with flair not usually seen in off the shelf image galleries. The author also discusses how to create images (in context) with captions, including a nice use of transparent PNGs. The author's creative use of captions give you options `outside of the box' (both semantically and philosophically) of normal captions that are seen all around the web.

Chapter 3 shows us that backgrounds don't have to be boring. This is a very simple chapter that discusses backgrounds of the past (repeating pictures, large pictures, etc), and then looks forward to the present in getting creative with your backgrounds. He uses a case study as an example, and it shows specifics of positioning and layering.

Chapter 4 jumps into Navigation. Different types of navigations are discussed (vertical, horizontal, tabbed, variable width, etc) and shown with specific examples. The author shows how to take from each of those to create advanced navigation systems using images and your semantic markup. I think that from this chapter a user could create an advanced navigation - simply because the foundation is set pretty solid before he gets to the advanced section. This chapter goes hand-in-hand with chapter 1 when talking about image replacement.

Chapter 5 discusses the dreaded (sometimes feared) Forms. Forms come in all shapes and sizes - and it is up to us to build them accordingly with the user in mind. The styling in this chapter spruces up what is a rather mundane form - while giving you great flexibility and hooks to extend yourself. The author discusses the several different layout types (top aligned label, left aligned label, right aligned label) and shows how to enhance each. If you work with forms often, this chapter will help you whip up a clean interface for the task.

Chapter 6 is everybody's favorite chapter - Rounded Corners. The author gives you an arsenal of tools (and knowledge) to attack the task of adding rounded corners. He discusses the different methods (horizontal stretching, vertical stretching, and full flexibility) and shows you how to achieve each - keeping in mind the task of keeping the marking minimal and meaningful. We also get a brief glimpse into what CSS3 will have to offer us with multiple backgrounds per element.

Chapter 7 closes out the book with Tables. Tables still have a strong place in web development - and the author shows you how to use tables properly (with semantic markup) and then how to give them a little visual jumpstart and interaction. The markup presented here helps you give clear meaning to your tables - as well as building with accessibility in mind (which is always important with tables, specifically). We round off the chapter looking at some interaction enhancements via Javascript that we can use with our tables (sorting, striping, and hovering).

Overall I found this book to be an excellent read. It was short and to the point, and gives the reader a great starting point (as well as inspiration). The book itself is well designed. My only qualms with the book is that the code examples are listed in full in many places, which gives less room for content related to the chapters. As I said in the beginning, this was a fairly quick read - but well worth it. I would say that this is for an intermediate CSS developer, as specific CSS is not discussed in great detail but given to you as a way to achieve a specific design task. If you are familiar with CSS and need a quick way to achieve the tasks listed above, then this book is perfect for you.

I bought this book based on the reviews. Foolish was I. I'm not sure I'll purchase any more Sitepoint books without driving over to the local book store and flipping through the pages first. My last three purchases from them have been a little disappointing.

If you haven't already read tons of books on CSS, then I can see how this would be an "ok" source of information. If you haven't already read "Transcending CSS" by Andy Clarke or CSS Mastery by Andy Budd, or even the somewhat outdated "Bulletproof Web Design" by Dan Cederholm, then I strongly suggest you start there. This book teaches/shows how "these" authors/designers pulled off certain tasks. I'm concerned about the techniques that are being used to teach those who are supposedly less informed than the authors.

I couldn't help but ask myself why they're teaching their readers to use empty <div>'s in their markup just for styling purposes. Many classes and ID's were assigned throughout this book simply for styling purposes alone. Not much emphasis was placed on semantics. In saying this, many things could have been accomplished with leaner markup and the use of adjacent and sibling selectors, attribute selectors, etc. If you read Clarke's or Budd's books, you'll learn that this extraneous code is completely superfluous and there are smarter ways to use your markup.

Topics they cover that have already been covered in numerous other books include:
1. Rounded Corners. This has been covered a ridiculous amount of times in other books. Try Dan Cederholm's Bulletproof Web Design that was released by New Riders a few years ago. Douglas Bowman has articles in his blog covering rounded corner navigation styling (Sliding Doors of CSS) that you can read for free at www.stopdesign.com.

2. Form Styling. Same information can be found in Andy Budd's CSS Mastery. It's essentially the same information. Cameron Moll also discusses some of these techniques on his blog.

3. Navigation/Link styling. The same information can be found in almost every CSS book I've read (to date is over 10 books on the subject) and every free online tutorial. This information hasn't really changed over the last 2 years.

4. Image Stacking and Transparency - Done by Jeff Croft in a recent Sitepoint publication entitled "Web Standards Creativity". See chapter 5. Feel free to check out my review on that book as well.

I'm still scratching my head over the significance of the word "Scientific" in the title of this book. Anyone care to comment on this review and explain that one to me? I'm becoming more and more disappointed with Sitepoint Publications as they come out. They're good at marketing, I guess, because I keep buying them and reading them. The titles are more misleading as each new publication comes out, and the content is re purposed from existing books - some of which are New Riders and Friends of Ed publications. There's nothing new here. If you've read other "good" books on the subject, I strongly recommend saving your money.

This new type of "workbook" format really visually helps display all the cool things you can do using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Plus since this book is co-authored by Cameron Adams and Jonathan Snook, there are tons of useful techniques that incorporate JavaScript with CSS. I have never seen a book that integrates CSS design techniques with JavaScript (accessible of course) and make it work seamlessly together.

There are beautiful screenshots of code snippets, screenshots of what each page will look like and really makes it easy on the eyes in learning the useful techniques of CSS. It is hard to list all the cool things that are covered in this book so I will just give a highlight.

Chapter 1- Image Replacement with CSS, Flash Image Replacement (sIFR) and JavaScript

Chapter 2 - Creating an image gallery: Styling the images, creating thumbnails, creating an album page; Styling contextual images, manipulating borders and padding, using floats for alignment of text and images, stacking and transparency (IE6 and IE7)

Chapter 3 - Using the background styles for images, creating a case-study design (Deadwood Design), absolute and relative positioning of images, using multiple background images (CSS3)

Chapter 4 - Creating navigation lists: Basic Vertical Navigation, IE issues (whitespace issue versus Firefox), creating a class for remember where user is in list; Basic Horizontal Navigation: Tabbed navigation, variable tab width issues, hover styles, creating multiple level navigation.

Chapter 5 - Forms: Labeling form elements (<label for = "">); fieldset and legend tags, creating table-less form layouts; styling error message labels for validartion (JavaScript)

Chapter 6 - Rounded Corners - Everything you ever wanted to about creating nicely rounded corners

Chapter 7 - Tables, creating some nicely styled professional looking tables with CSS and JavaScript.

If you have been using CSS for awhile this book is a useful reference for specific techniques you have had trouble with or if your new to CSS it will help you learn all the cool things you can do with CSS but never thought to think of. The book is written in an easy to learn format that is great for any level.

Go get it!

This is not a comprehensive A-Z book on CSS, it is a compilation of seven essay / tutorials by five different authors on specific topics (headings, images, backgrounds, navigation, forms, rounded corners, and tables). This book is much like 7 blind folks describing an elephant and whole swatches of the elephant are left uncovered and undescribed.

It seems to be a trend amongst the tech publishers to put out books with multiple authors, yet very few of them provide any cohesive editing and authorial narrative between sections, of which The Art & Science of CSS is an offender.

Publishers and Editors, please either take a cue from short story and essay compilations and give each author an introduction at the beginning of each chapter, tell my why I should care and what this person can educate me on. If that is not the approach you want take, then have one main author or editor who crafts all the chapters into a cohesive whole with good transitions and point of view.

Sitepoint - Hire an editor who can edit. Pick one main author. Introduce the guest authors at each point where the authorship transitions. Give the reader a cohesive POV.

Amazon leads one to believe that Jonathan Snook is the main author, he is not, but has a few bits on javascript & css in several chapters. I would have liked this book a great deal more if it actually was the Art & Science of CSS with a strong voice all the way through, rather than just a few drill downs into a few topics. Cameron Adams or Jina Bolton both had great written tones & POV, why not have one of them "lead" the reader through the content?

This is really another amazing book from Sitepoint which has been putting out a great line of web design/standards/crafting books. This book seems to follow right along the same bent: concise, well-written content at exactly the right level of detail to convey the point the authors are working on at the moment.

Art & Science won't teach you the fundamentals of flow, divs, spans, or even CSS basics like classes and IDs; however, the progress through the book is so well-paced and clear that you'll be able to fill in any gaps in your knowledge as you read along.

The book has seven chapters, each on a specific aspect of CSS such as Headings, Images, or Navigation. The chapters lay out basic premises of the topic, such as how you want to think about your headings as part of a page/site's branding and impact, then move on to details of creating and implementing a beautiful design. Each chapter makes its points in small, incremental steps such as starting off with basic vertical navigation, progressing to more advanced horizontal such as navigation with hover/current location changes, then finishes up with advanced concepts like matrixing menu images so you can show complex combinations simply by dealing with positioning.

All of this is accomplished in a style and depth of content that's applicable to folks with rudimentary design/CSS skills (i.e. yours truely) as well as accomplished web designers. What really amazes me is that the authors hit such a broad audience (and did it well!), covered a broad range of topics in detail, and pulled it all off in just over 200 pages. (And those pages, by the way, are glorious full color.)

This is a great book for learning how to deal with CSS in an elegant, well-architected fashion. It's simply a terrific book if you're doing anything at all with CSS.

This is a how-to, cookbook kind of book that does a good job of focusing on the most important "black magic" aspects of CSS. In a well-written, couple of hundred pages it manages to do a good job of covering images, backgrounds, navigation, forms, tables, and even those blasted rounded corners. (Who knew they required so much extra work?)
The accompanying pictures are in color - which seems like a no-brainer for website design books, but isn't always the case. That and the clearly-written code samples make learning how to create visually impressive websites relatively painless - and fun for a change.

On the whole, it's a good book that I'd recommend to any web designer whose CSS skills are somewhere between Beginner and Expert. It is a bit 'uneven' quality-wise, but that's only to be expected since there are five different authors.

The chapters about styling forms and tables are really very good, and they alone justify the purchase of the book. If you've wondered how to achieve cross-browser styling of FIELDSET and LEGEND elements, this is where you find out.

I do like that the authors take accessibility seriously and really emphasise its importance, while showing how you can achieve visually stunning designs. Only a few examples have accessibility issues, and those are clearly pointed out by the authors.

The only thing that irks me is the habitual use of pretend-XHTML for no adequately explained reason. Especially the chapter where all the examples use an XHTML 1.1 doctype which the author clearly intends to serve as text/html. That sort of mistakes shouldn't be allowed to slip through the editorial cracks for a book of this calibre.

My background in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is minimal. I have taken two half day classes at our local university and I have no experience in practical usage of CSS. I am very comfortable with HTML coding but often use a WYSIWYG application to make functional no frills sites listing reference information. The book The Art & Science of CSS (published by Sitepoint) is very good for beginner to medium skill level users to pick up and work through. The title led me to believe that I was going to be exposed to practical methodology of adding well thought out design to my web site. The book did not disappoint.

In the Navigation chapter there were four ways to build navigation shown (basic-no frills horizontal, vertical, vertical with tabs, vertical with graphics). This is just one example of how the book walks the user through several levels of the sample project, each one displaying a good visual presence on its own. The book takes these presences and slowly builds off each producing even a better visual piece. Building skill upon skill is a wonderful learning process. I got the feeling of a natural progression of working on a project. You work awhile, analyze the results and see where you need to make it better, then work some more.

Several sections mentioned or displayed how different browsers will view content. A fix was provided for those occurrences where the differences were unacceptable. Other sections worked through a thought process pointing out the good and the bad about alternatives. There were several references on how to alter code that complies with screenreader usage.

A slight touch of humor was scattered throughout the book such as a "grasshopper" reference from a 70's TV series titled Kung Fu. Yes, I'm old enough to have watched it-but I was very young. I was amused how throughout the book they kept giving me ways to stop using tables to format data and in the end showed how to make tables shine in ways tables where intended to be used. Is there anything I didn't like about the book? No, I really can't think of anything. It prompted you to a web site where you can download material to walk through the examples. I will need to go over certain sections of the book again so I fully grasp individual details but I will assume this is because of my lack of skill with using CSS. I highly recommend this book and feel that it will help users take control of their web site...GOODBYE TEMPLATES!

I think there are many books that cover this ground a lot better and cheaper as well. Friends of Ed actually has a couple that I would recommend before this. And most certainly Bulletproof Web Design by Cederholm.

This book is really light on details and light on content. It's not at all worth its price, and it's only covering the very basics in a small number of areas. This is definitely not one of the first books you should be looking at about CSS.

Standards-based design might seem dull but CSS-based design needn't be - and THE ART & SCIENCE OF CSS gathers together designers who show how to take a typical web site design and add CSS to jazz up results. Any college-level computer library catering to programmers and web designers will find this packed with ideas on how to design forms which are attractive and functional alike. From creating eye-catching tables and designing forms to vertical navigation basics, THE ART & SCIENCE OF CSS has lots of detail and applied website information perfect for practicing designers.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch