CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions [Paperback]

Simon Collison (Author), Andy Budd (Author), Cameron Moll (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 29, 2009 | ISBN-10: 1430223979 | ISBN-13: 978-1430223979 | Edition: 2

Building on what made the first edition a bestseller, CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions, Second Edition unites the disparate information on CSS-based design spread throughout the internet into one definitive, modern guide. Revised to cover CSS3, the book can be read from front to back, with each chapter building on the previous one. However, it can also be used as a reference book, dipping into each chapter or technique to help solve specific problems. In short, this is the one book on CSS that you need to have.

This second edition contains:

• New examples and updated browser support information
• New case studies from Simon Collison and Cameron Moll
• CSS3 examples, showing new CSS3 features, and CSS3 equivalents to tried and tested CSS2 techniques

What you’ll learn

• The best practice concepts in CSS design.
• The most important (and tricky) parts of CSS
• Identify and fix the most common CSS problems
• How to deal with the most common bugs
• Completely up to date browser support information
• Covers CSS3 as well as CSS2 showing you the future of CSS

Who this book is for

This book will be aimed towards intermediate web designers/developers, although the examples should be simple enough for novice designers/developers with a basic understanding of CSS to grasp. Readers will probably have read beginner/intermediate instructional books such as Web Standards Solutions and will be looking for more practical and in-depth information. This book is likely to have a broad appeal, attracting intermediate developers wanting to improve their skills as well as advanced developers wanting a useful reference.

The CSS 2/3 content of the book is delivered in a way that allows readers to learn CSS2 techniques that they can implement now in professional work, and then gem up on CSS3 techniques if they want to start looking towards the future.

Table of Contents

1. Setting the Foundations
2. Getting Your Styles to Hit the Target
3. Visual Formatting Model Overview
4. Using Backgrounds for Effect
5. Styling Links
6. Styling Lists and Creating Nav Bars
7. Styling Forms and Data Tables
8. Layout
9. Bugs and Bug Fixing
10. Case Study: Roma Italia
11. Case Study: Climb the Mountains

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

In October 2006, Simon Collision started Erskine Design—based in Nottingham, U.K.—which grew to become an eight-strong team of creative web designers and developers who are afraid of nothing. Some people say they're one of the best agencies out there, and their clients include major magazines, government stuff, software companies—and polar explorers.

Moons ago, he was a successful visual artist, and founded an independent arts org and annual arts festival, putting his degree to some use at least. Then he caught the interwebs bug.

As lead web developer at Agenzia from 2002 to 2006, he worked on numerous web projects for major record labels (such as Poptones, Universal) and bands (including The Libertines, Dirty Pretty Things, Beta Band), visual artists and illustrators (Jon Burgerman, Paddy Hartley, Lucy Orta, NOW Festival), businesses, community, and voluntary sector orgs, passionately ensuring everything was accessible and complied with current web standards.

He does a bit of public speaking here and there, and will generally do anything for a biscuit and cup of tea, but prefers hard cash.

He has lived in many cities, including London and Reykjavik, but has now settled back in his beloved Nottingham, where the grass is green and the girls are pretty. He also drives a 31-year-old car, and has a stupid cat called Bearface.

Andy Budd is one of the founding partners at User Experience Design Consultancy, Clearleft. As an interaction design and usability specialist, Andy is a regular speaker at international conferences like Web Directions, An Event Apart, and SXSW. Andy curates dConstruct, one of the U.K.'s most popular design conferences. He's also responsible for UX London, the U.K.'s first dedicated usability, information architecture, and user experience design event.

Andy was an early champion of web standards in the U.K. and has developed an intimate understanding of the CSS specifications and cross-browser support. As an active member of the community, Andy has helped judge several international design awards and currently sits on the advisory board for .NET magazine. Andy is also the driving force behind Silverbackapp, a low-cost usability testing tool for the Mac. Andy is an avid Twitter user and occasionally blogs at andybudd.com.

Never happier than when he's diving in some remote tropical atoll, Andy is a qualified PADI dive instructor and retired shark wrangler.

Cameron Moll has been designing meaningful web interfaces that harmonize utility and presentation since the late 1990s. His work or advice has been featured by HOW, Print, and Communication Arts magazines, Forrester Research, National Public Radio (NPR), and many others. He speaks on user interface design at conferences nationally and internationally, and he is also the author of Mobile Web Design.

Cameron is the founder and president of Authentic Jobs, Inc., a targeted destination for web and creative professionals and the companies seeking to hire them. He is also the proprietor of Cameron Moll, LLC, whose products include letterpress typography posters available for purchase at cameronmoll.bigcartel.com. And amid all this craziness, he still finds time to play ball with each of his four boys.

You can also find Cameron online at cameronmoll.com, twitter.com/cameronmoll, flickr.com/photos/authentic, and vimeo.com/cameronmoll.

Product Details

• Paperback: 366 pages
• Publisher: friendsofED; 2 edition (October 29, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1430223979
• ISBN-13: 978-1430223979
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #56,328 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #19 in Books > Computers & Technology > Programming > Languages & Tools > CSS

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars pretty good, December 19, 2009

By 

Jonathan Steinmann (TAMPA, FL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions (Paperback)

I'm an advanced CSS web designer, so I purchased this book as more of a reference, along with some new css3 ideas. At first, the book didn't impress me. But the more I dug into the book the more I enjoyed it. There are some nice topics that even advanced users can grab some tidbits and reminders. Overall, it's a book targeting beginner to intermediate level designers. I give it 4 out of 5 stars.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic guide to CSS development, April 5, 2010

By 

AquaMunkee "Aqua" (Madison, WI) - See all my reviews

This review is from: CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions (Paperback)

I'm totally new to CSS, having only recently learned the meaning of the acronym a month ago by reading Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML. Once I finished that great introductory guide I found myself wanting to learn more advanced techniques, and this book delivered.

At 350 ages this book was a relatively concise guide, and I found all 3 authors had a very readable style that included well thought-out examples to help with retention. I will admit that the editing got progressively more sloppy toward the end of the book, especially in the two case studies that were added with the new edition. However, the errors were obvious enough that it didn't impede my learning and I still greatly value this book as an exceptional guide which I know I will frequently rely upon as a reference.

What I appreciated most was the well-rounded approach to providing standards-based programming guidance while also warning the reader of browser-specific bugs you would likely encounter. Although you quickly realize Internet Explorer has done a lot of work to earn their horrific reputation among web developers, I never felt like any of the authors were anti-IE crusaders as they all tried to give credit to the IE team's efforts with each new release to improve compliance to the CSS standard... wow, I sound like I really know what I'm talking about! I suppose that in and of itself is a good recommendation for someone with less than a month of experience!

In all seriousness, this book was a great guide and reference, and it's already helped me to quickly work through a browser-specific bug that I encountered shortly after returning to my web site to use my newfound tricks. Having devoured both the Head First guide and this guide, I now feel my appetite for CSS knowledge has been satiated (and have since moved on to conquer PHP & MySQL). ;-)

5 stars, very highly recommended!!!!!

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Solid introduction to CSS, January 25, 2010

By 

YYZtech.ca (Toronto, Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions (Paperback)

The authors of CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions have put together a book that teaches how CSS works and how to that applies to the modern web browsers in and easy-to-follow format. The book is broken into sections covering various areas of page layout as well as tips on how to work around different browser's implementations of CSS. The book also includes case studies that take readers though designing complete web site layouts as well as a solid foundation in the often-forgotten basics of CSS.

The first chapter covers how CSS works. This includes how cascading affects how rules are interpreted, the !important keyword, as well as some tips on how to organize, compress and style sheets as well as mentioning how Apache's gzip compression can help out. There is a lot of basics here that, yes, might require reading more than once to understand, but are really important to understand how to write good, compact CSS code. The section on selectors is probably also helpful if you find yourself using the jQuery library later- the way it selects markup to operate on is the same.

Chapter two covers the box model, Internet Explorer's unique interpretation of it, positioning, clearing add other bits on how elements are displayed on the page. What readers won't find in this book is any coverage of CSS3 or HTML5- and that's maybe just as well. Today it seems like while pretty much everything that isn't Internet Explorer is supporting these emerging standards in some fashion. However, for now coders using CSS3 are finding they have to repeat almost the same code three times with browser-specific prefix before each CSS3 attribute, plus the proposed "official" syntax and there's the too-familiar grey area between what different browser engines say they support and how they implement them.

After the first two chapters the book looks at how to work with images, lists and forms, providing background information and practical examples on how to create specific effects. Chapter three looks at background images and image replacement, including the four popular methods for replacing search-engine friendly and accessible text with more stylized images. Creating rounded cornered boxes and drop shadows are also demonstrated.

Chapter four and five cover styling lists to create attractive-looking interface elements. Chapter four covers styling links by adding graphics to them and creating navigation bars Chapter five covers lists and creating navigation bars, tabbed interfaces and fancy image maps, much like the ones found at Flickr and Facebook.

Chapter eight is called "Hacks and Filters" and, as the title might suggest, this is on getting around how various browser bugs and oddities- and occasionally using those oddities to make something work for you. Examples include Internet Explorer's proprietary conditional comments or actual parsing errors to import styles. Personally I'm not a big fan of relying on parsing bugs -- bugs, after all, eventually might get fixed -- but if you really need to get something working on, say, Internet Explorer for Mac, it makes sense. On the other hand, some of the bugs might be good to be aware of in case you accidentally run into them. This is a very useful chapter even if you think you know enough CSS; CSS is a standard, how it's been (mis)implemented over the years is a whole other story!

The book is not perfect. As some reviews have mentioned, there are a number of errors in the 1st edition, the Friends of Ed site has a link to corrections. Advanced developers might see a few things missing to; for instance there isn't much on caching (such as Apache's gzip or ETags support) or some utilities both off-line and on-line for compressing files, like Yahoo's CSS compressor that are important for production websites, but then again, maybe these are more a server issue than a CSS issue, as well as the aforementioned lack of CSS3 coverage which is probably for the best until things settle-down a bit more.