CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions (Paperback)

by Andy Budd (Author), Simon Collison (Author), Cameron Moll (Author)
Key Phrases: proprietary box model, selector hack, horizontal nav bar, Internet Explorer, Tuscany Luxury Resorts, Unsurpassed Comfort (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Over the past couple of years, web designers and developers have begun taking more care in designing and building web sites. Less readily do they turn to old-fashioned techniques such as GIF spacers, tables for layout, and deprecated HTML elements, which can cause accessibility/usability problems and are just bad practice. There are three main web standards married together to create usable, standards-compliant web designs - XHTML for data structure, JavaScript for dynamic effects, and Cascading Style Sheets for styling your data.

Working as a companion to our Web Standards Solutions book, this title covers advanced Cascading Style Sheet techniques, and includes are all the techniques you need to master CSS and craft modern, standards-compliant web page designs. You'll already know why you should be using CSS, so we don’t bore you with pages of theory; instead, we jump straight into practical solutions, allowing you to get what you need as quickly as possible.

Renowned web designer Andy Budd starts off by introducing the elements of an effective CSS toolkit, including good working practices, the cascade, the box model, relative and absolute positioning, floating, and more. He then delves into advanced techniques like replacing images, styling links and lists, creating navigation menus, making forms look good, debugging and overcoming browser quirks, and hacking and filtering. The book is rounded off with two case studies to give you inspiration for your own designs, written by two more of the world’s finest web designers, Simon Collinson and Cameron Moll.

About the Author
Andy is an internationally renowned web designer, developer and weblog author based in Brighton, England. Andy specializes in building attractive, accessible, and standards complaint web solutions. Andy enjoys writing about web techniques for sites such as digital-web.com and his work has been featured in numerous magazines, books, and websites around the world.

Simon is Lead Web Developer at Agenzia (www.agenzia.co.uk), and has worked on numerous web projects for record labels, high-profile recording artists, leading visual artists and illustrators, including The Libertines, Black Convoy, and Project Facade. Simon also oversees a production line of business, community and voluntary sector websites, and passionately ensures everything he builds is accessible, usable, and complies with current web standards. Simon regularly reviews CSS-based websites for Stylegala, and does his best to keep his highly popular blog (www.collylogic.com) updated with noise about web standards, music, film, travels, and more web standards.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 280 pages
• Publisher: friends of ED (February 13, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590596145
• ISBN-13: 978-1590596142
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 7.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (118 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #4,698 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

169 of 174 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best CSS Reference Book in print today!, March 12, 2006

By	Frank Stepanski (PA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

When I heard Andy Budd (http://www.clearleft.com/, http://www.andybudd.com/)was writing a CSS book I knew I had to get it. Andy is one of the top UK web designers for past years and anything he has to say you should listen. :)

This book is for anybody who has played around with CSS a little and wondered "what the h*ll can I do with this stuff?". CSS has been around for awhile now, but only recently has the most current browsers been able to support the cool stuff you can do with it. What cool stuff? You need to buy the book to find out, but I'll give you some highlights...

First off, the first chapter explains how to use document types, divs and spans, validation, basics of CSS (selectors, pseudo-classes, child and sibling selectors, attribute selectors, etc), how cascade and specifity works, and how to organize your style sheets. A great primer to the rest of the book.

The 2nd chapter focuses visual formatting with CSS with the Box Model, Positioning and Floating. This is an important topic because creating CSS layouts requires a good understanding of how these topics work (and work together) in creating "real-world layouts.

Chapter 3 talks about using background images and replacement in creating rounded corner effects, drop shadows (4 different kinds), and some cool image replacement for optimizing search engines and screen readers (accessibility).

Chapter 4 has some great examples on styling links to create efficient CSS buttons without the images or the JavaScript for the "roll-over" effect. Yes, CSS can create some cool buttons without you ever having to use Photoshop. :)

Chapter 5 continues with styling links but extends it in showing you how to create button nav bars (horizontal and vertical) and adds a few tricks with using some image placeholders and sections to create some nice looking professional navigation for your website.

Chapter 6 focuses on the right way to use tables: for displaying data (not layout for web sites - no more nested tables). With the use of the very popular border-collapse property and others, Andy shows some very eye-please table layouts.

Chapter 7 in my opinion is the meat-and-potatoes of the book. Its goes over some how to use CSS in creating some standardized layouts. The whole point of CSS is to separate your content and layout and this is the way to go. It is explained in a very easy to follow manner with plenty of screenshots to show you each step.

The rest of the book (Chapter 8 and Chapter 9) review the common and not-so-common CSS hacks that are used to overcome some browser deficiencies. I can't tell you how many website I had to search to find out about these, and its all here in these 2 chapters!.

The last part of the book has 2 Case Studies that show how a website created purely with CSS was created from beginning to end. A great finish to a great book.

Throw out all your other CSS books and just get this one.

78 of 82 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Useful book, but sloppy editing, July 21, 2006

By	JM - See all my reviews

This is quite a useful book, as has been well documented in other reviews. The tips are helpful, the examples are useful, and the typography and layout are easy on the eyes.

However -- and this is a big however -- the book is riddled with technical errors. The errata file, available for download from the publisher as a PDF file, currently runs a whopping 11 pages. While a small handful of errors in a technical book's first edition is inevitable, 11 pages is not a small handful for a book as thin as this. It's really inexcusable that so many errors -- some of them quite obvious -- made it past the editor.

52 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good Book but how about checking typos before publishing?, April 9, 2006

By	J.Gustafsson (Las Vegas, NV USA) - See all my reviews

Before you buy this book from all the glowing reviews check this link below, & it will show you all the aggravating typos in this book. (10 total pages of corrections.)

http://www.cssmastery.com/CSSMastery-Errata.pdf

It makes it very irritating to use.

The book is good if you are ready to stick with it, but before I buy from these authors again, I am waiting for the errata to be a few months old. It kind of feels like a ripoff to get a book that you have to constantly go back & forth to a pdf (painful) to make sure it isn't a typo on your part when css does not work as expected.

I like friends of ed books in general, but we do pay money for these things as customers & should demand more from authors.