Customer Reviews

CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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!!!!!

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.

This book was for my brother-in-law. He sent me a letter thanking me for the wonderful gift. I appreciate that very much!

This book is a great starting point for beginners. This book is well written and easy to follow alomg. Wish it had practical exercises. I would recommend a CSS3 book after this one.

This book hits the mark for those who have a good basic understanding of CSS, CSS3's capabilities, and have built at least several web sites with CSS and have run into the frustrations of dealing with all the browser issues out there, and who want to get a good handle on how to built navigation bars/lists, columns and styled paragraphs, text, and want a no-nonsense reference and understanding of DIV floating principles, as well as elastic and liquid layouts...without making it more complicate than it needs to be.

It is well-written, and gives you the principles you need to understand in order to do things, no matter how unorthodox, to make sure your site's styles are viewed consistently in all the major browsers, as far back as IE 5 for the Mac.

I felt the "Missing Manual" CSS book was simply too elementary for me at this stage, although I could use a better fundamental education on CSS in certain areas.

Everything from relative/absolute positioning, to styling horizontal and vertical navigation menus, to creating completely fluid web site layout basics are covered here. It's well-organized, gets to the point, and speak to you at a level it should, if you have some experience with CSS.

If you lack some confidence in your ability to design your own advanced CSS layouts, menus and effects still, but know you can do it with the right direction, this is the book for you.

I paid WAY too much for it ($40) but that is because I bought it at a brick and mortar retail location, as I make sure to browse through these types of books pretty thoroughly before deciding to buy them.

In any case, CSS books are all over the place, and there's a zillion different ways to do things, this book at least speaks to designers in an intelligent and functional fashion that just tells us what we need to know, so that we can take advanced principles and reference material, and customize our sites accordingly. If you need everything spelled out for you regarding every possible situation you run into, then you probably won't succeed in this field, it takes a basic creative mind and application of principles, and a lot of trial and error. This book does an commendable job of communicating things

I have been writing HTML and CSS for a number of years and was hoping this book would improve my skills and bring me up to date in the latest CSS techniques. For the most part this was achieved.

My main gripe with this book is the errors and typos. In a technical book a typo is a big deal, in one example the author writes in the text to use negative margins but then in the code below a normal magin is used! There are a number of similar examples throughout the book. To compound the problem the only available errata I could find was for the first edition.

Despite this it is well written and full of great explanations of advanced concepts and techniques. I would try and find the errata for the 2nd edition before buying it however.

Just be aware this isn't a beginners book, I would not recommend this book to someone starting out with HTML and CSS. A lot of fundamental knowledge is assumed. Which is fine for a book with advanced in the title.

I wish it was double the length because the authors do a good job of explaining how things works and also why certain design decisions work and/or don't work. I started with just enough CSS to get by but after finishing this book and playing around for countless hours with the examples I found myself appreciating well designed web sites more than I used to.

I got this book for school, and it has helped a bunch with tutorials and things that you can use in real life situations. gives visual and code examples. However there is a smaller size of the book roughly 2/3's the size of this boo. Hopefully they stock that one, it would be easier to carry.

One of the best CSS books I've read so far. Andy managed to explain everything in a very clearly manner. I think this book will benefit both newbies and advanced web developers. I'd say this is a must for a newbie, it will broaden your imagination of what CSS is capable of doing, and will show you very simple ways of achieving it. For advanced users - you probably won't find a lot that you haven't seen, but still definitely worth skimming through. 5 stars! Andy waiting for the new edition, would love more from CSS3, and it's combination with HTML5. Follow me on Twitter @mmamedov