Customer Reviews

CSS: The Definitive Guide

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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When Eric wrote the first edition of this book way back at the turn of the millenium, he proposed to "explain CSS in all its warts and glory." For CSS enthusiasts at the time, that was an advance -- every other author and Web lecturer fixated on the warts!

Six years have changed a lot. CSS, as a tool of modern Web professionals, has moved way beyond its former role as window-dressing for HTML. HTML (and XML) work in partnership with CSS to produce the most logical and yet most flexible page structure that defines current Web document standards.

The book has just about all you need as both a reference and basic how-to. Eric concentrates on the CSS properties and techniques that have real support among browsers. This increases the practical value of the book. Discussion of CSS selectors has been expanded to reflect the growing support for more powerful (and complex!) selector syntax. Most pages have multiple illustrations to clarify text. The book has updated information related to Firefox and IE7.

One disappointment was the sparse coverage of print media styles. Admittedly, browser support of print styling is itself disappointing but a lot of printing is done from the browser and there are still lots of things we can do, as Eric shows in some of his other writings.

Eric's ongoing experience with key real-life Web issues and design knowledge binds the material together and makes this a superior book.
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CSS: The Definitive Guide details the ins and outs of the CSS specification. It is filled with numerous easy to follow examples. The illustrations that accompany the examples are invaluable as they allow you to easily compare the markup, the applied style sheets, and the results which greatly enhanced my understanding of the material. The humor included in the examples made me laugh more than once which is a welcome relief when tackling such a complex topic as cascading style sheets.

This edition of the book covers version 2.1 of the CSS specification. The author routinely points out where the specification was unclear as well as how certain browsers violate the spec which really helps point out what style sheet authors need to watch out for when targeting certain browsers. This is information that is not in the specification and could take a lot of time to find out on your own.

If you are wanting to learn all you can about how to enhance the visual presentation of your site, are wanting to learn more about the capabilities of CSS so you can see how to modify the look of sites you visit using reader style sheets, or just want to find out what all of the buzz surround cascading style sheets is about then I'd recommend this book.

I do have to warn you though, the author leaves no corner unturned. He starts out slow with an introduction to cascading style sheets and what they bring to the table. The following chapters then delve head first into topic after topic. You can be sure that you will know the technology through and through by the time you are finished with the book, just be prepared to spend some time working through the material.

The author has done a wonderful job bringing to life a subject that might otherwise be quite dry. The years of experience he shares in chapter after chapter has made me glad that I've added this book to my library.

This book is a reference, and quite an excellent one at that. Definitely complete (as the title implies).

However, you won't really learn how to use CSS to design websites with it.

This book is for people who already have a pretty good handle on website design. I guess a good analogy would be that you can't learn English from the Oxford Dictionary, but the Oxford can certainly benefit you once you already know the language.

Reader Review: "CSS: The Definitive Guide" by Eric Meyer

CSS: The Definitive Guide Paperback
by Eric A Meyer

I'm a beginner; just learning and using CSS, and need finite assistance, a resource guide, and a mentor during my learning curve.

As a beginner, I've looked through several books, and in my opinion, I believe "CSS: The Definitive Guide" is exactly that, a definitive guide, but I also believe it deserves the words "Most Excellent" in the title. ;-]

When I received the book I was using Dreamweaver CS2, and in the process of converting older files to xhtml and CSS. I was in a problem solving mode concerning background images not showing in Dreamweaver's (wysiwyg), but the background image were showing in browser tests. Holding the book by the spine with my left hand, I separated the pages with my right hand forefinger and thumb, and it just happened to fall open at the book's approximate midsection, page 255, where one of the subheadings stated "Background Images". Wow! I was impressed at this serendipitous, and fortuitous accidental event.

As I read though a few paragraphs, I noted the examples, looked at the Dreamweaver code and made the changes according to the book. Immediately, Dreamweaver reacted and displayed the page as I had expected it to see it.

This book is not a cover to cover read where you curl up by the fire and read all night, it is a well indexed research support manual -- keep it within reach -- you got a problem w/CSS? -- articulate the problem in your mind, then solve the problem using this book's resources -- checking the adequate table of contents and/or index.

I'm presently involved in several computer projects, but this book keeps calling my name... I like it! I pick it up, open it, read a few paragraphs, and I am seeing and understanding a language that up until now, was just out of my reach. It is fun and rewarding to know I am beginning to understand a new language, CSS, and I am reminded of my 9th grade Spanish teacher who would praise us verbally saying when one of us (students) would read an English sentence then state it correctly in Spanish, "Now you're cooking with gas!" We all wanted, and worked hard to hear that reward, and now as I begin to "speak CSS" I feel that by saying the reward phrase to myself. ;-]

I love it when authors write about the subject, and even though it may be dry, they can offer a bit of humor. I also appreciate those authors who leave their ego out of the dialog, e.g., "now I am going to show you..." UGH!

(CSS) Cascading Style Sheets is of course, the accepted stylesheet language for describing and formatting the presentation of markup language documents, and this book can teach the reader to "read, speak, write and converse in the language."

The book "CSS: The Definitive Guide" goes to the point discussion, defines the point, often in more than one way, explains the principle of the rule, and when necessary shows example code and an illustrative example... what more could you ask? ... Color illustrations maybe ;-] -- Buy the book.

Jerry L Cline, Phx Az

I feel obliged to review this book after being unable to accomplish a simple css task: designing an improved css file.

Meyers knows his subject. But he keeps using fancy examples or unnecessarily complex coverage that detracts from the content non-experts need to learn. For example, I was attempting to figure out why a certain case of inheritance is failing. His section on that is too complex to follow, because he covers the entire inheritance resolution scheme of css, rather than the simple cases that most frequently appear. So I was never able to solve the problem. I had to resort to searching the net.

After reading the first few chapters, I needed to go back and find where he discussed first-child. Skimming did not find it, so I checked the index. It's not there! So I was forced again to search the net.

This could have been resolved by writing clearly. Every time you introduce something of importance, bold it or put it in a section heading. Then skimming will allow finding it easily.

At this point I decided the book was not quite worthy of sitting on the same shelf as my dozens of other web dev books, and so I tossed it in the trash. Your mileage may vary, but for me it's a time waster.

I think you need to own this book.

Really, if you're going to take CSS seriously, it's the bible. It covers more ground than any other book and is remarkably clear given its ambitious agenda.

The current edition knows about IE 7, Safari 2, Firefox 2, and all the other recent browsers, plus of course it knows about older browsers and all their weaknesses. Unfortunately, you need to know that sort of stuff too. (How much easier life would be if only all browsers were always 100% standards-compliant!)

One more thing: The publisher, O'Reilly, is a great company. You call them and a helpful person (not a computer) answers the phone. They take care of your customer service concerns quickly, professionally, and in a friendly fashion. That's a nice bonus, but the five-star rating is exclusively for the book.

I've managed development efforts for several years and, although I'm an advanced developer in ASP.Net and numerous server-side technologies, felt I was too much at the mercy of "the web guys" on my project teams when it came to making decisions on content design. So, a couple years ago I purchased Richard York's "Beginning CSS" (Wrox Press) and found it to be an excellent primer on CSS. Having designed my own style-sheets for the couple years since, I realized I still had some questions as to the finer points of CSS design techniques.

I purchased Eric Meyer's "CSS: The Definitive Guide" and consider it an excellent second volume on the subject. If you are brand new to the topic of CSS, I'd recommend one of this author's other more introductory titles before attempting to read this title. Both Meyer's and York's more introductory texts focus more on building block examples and levels of support offered by the various browsers. "CSS: The Definitive Guide" assumes this foundation is in place and, instead, focuses on the more advanced and, as the title says, definitive discussions of topics Meyer has found to represent points of confusion among content developers.

I have had great luck with numerous volumes in O'Reilly's line of "Topic: The Definitive Guide", and this book continues this string of good luck. While it is not the ideal introductory text on CSS, for reasons cited above, it represents a great second volume - or even first volume for the content developer who already understands the basic principles and does not need building block examples. Numerous sections, especially the very succinct discussions of the CSS Box Model, are by themselves worth the price of the book.

--Doug Hettinger

This is an excellent tutorial, and the discussion of the box model in Chapter 7 is alone worth the price of the book. If you think you understand CSS, but you don't understand the box model fully, then you don't really understand CSS. And Eric Meyer does a very good job of walking you slowly through that model. The chapters after chapter 7 fill in that model more completely with additional details that are also indispensable.

However, I think this book should have been called "CSS: A Complete Tutorial," rather than "CSS: The Definitive Guide." This is not laid out in a way that would make it ideal as a reference book.

Overall, this is a sort of book where you won't get an answer to your question without rereading a couple of pages first. Second, the index is quite poor. Basic concepts covered throughout the book don't make their way into the index. Third, while the appendix of CSS properties is useful, a glaring omission is the lack of a browser compatibility chart. Certainly creating such a chart would be difficult, but still necessary (I think) for calling something "The Definitive Guide." Browser compatibility is certainly subject to improve over time, but a baseline list of compatibility at the time of publication would be highly useful, considering that such resources on the web are virtually not to be found. After all, O'Reilly's "Javascript: The Definitive Guide" at least manages to list the standard that defines each portion of the language, whereas the appendix in this book doesn't even do that.

That said, this book has revolutionized my own understanding of CSS, since I read it like a tutorial, and it seems I was badly in need of a tutorial. Consequently, for those who don't understand the true mechanics of CSS, I highly recommend buying and reading this book cover to cover. For those who are well-versed in the underlying mechanics and simply want a reference to the nitty-gritty details, however, this is probably not your answer.

I've seen graphical guides for CSS and I've seen very complete descriptions of CSS elements, but this book is a great combination of the two. For every styling element mentioned in this book, there is at least one diagram to help understand how it works. This way you can see exactly where the borders of an element are. This book isn't about making things pretty with CSS, in fact all the examples produce very ugly and plain results. The point instead is to show every single CSS element and what happens when you change the attributes of it.

I found this extremely useful for floating elements. There are 9 given situations where blocks are floating in the page. For each example, a supporting diagram shows where the element is put in the code of the page and where it actually will display based on the floating attributes and what other blocks are already on the page.

One thing the book could have used would be browser compatibility references. I know that support for page-break-before/after/inside is sketchy, but perhaps it's just beyond the scope of this book. It's a book about CSS styles and how they interact with each other, but not necessarily when it's safe to use them.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL. Thus CSS primarily enables the separation of document content written in HTML or a similar markup language from document presentation written in CSS. Thus, this book will be helpful if you are a web designer or document author interested in sophisticated page styling, improved accessibility, and saving time and effort. All you really need before starting the book is a decent knowledge of HTML 4.0, and the book covers everything else you need to know and has lots of examples. This book covers CSS2 and CSS2.1 up through the 11 April 2006 Working Draft. Some CSS3 selectors are also mentioned and covered. I found this to be a pretty good book for someone trying to learn CSS from scratch as well as someone seeking a good up-to-date reference on the subject. Particularly helpful is the Sample HTML 4 Style Sheet in Appendix C. Chapter one makes the case for CSS as bringing order to the chaos that web documents had sunk into by the year 2000, and the rest of the book mentions all of the aspects of CSS that you need to know to use the technology effectively. The following is the table of contents:

Chapter 1. CSS and Documents
Chapter 2. Selectors
Chapter 3. Structure and the Cascade
Chapter 4. Values and Units
Chapter 5. Fonts
Chapter 6. Text Properties
Chapter 7. Basic Visual Formatting
Chapter 8. Padding, Borders, and Margins
Chapter 9. Colors and Backgrounds
Chapter 10. Floating and Positioning
Chapter 11. Table Layout
Chapter 12. Lists and Generated Content
Chapter 13. User Interface Styles
Chapter 14. Non-Screen Media
Appendix A. Property Reference
Appendix B. Selector, Pseudo-Class, and Pseudo-Element Reference
Appendix C. Sample HTML 4 Style Sheet