Customer Reviews

CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions

5 star:		(92)
4 star:		(23)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

While I don't recommend this book for beginners, it is close to a perfect intermediate text on using CSS well. The book covers the most common tasks a web designer will encounter, and clarifies some of the complexity of CSS. The book also covers cross-browser issues - the most common problem that web developers will encounter.

It's been awhile since I've enjoyed a good technical book. Most of the time they drone on and on about stuff I either already know or more often, stuff I don't know and would take years to know. It's so great when I find a book that matches where I'm at technically and one that really becomes part of my everyday working life. Designing with Web Standards was one, CSS Mastery is now the other.

Andy Budd now lives right next door to Zeldman on my desk. Seriously, CSS Mastery is a great title. It's not beginning CSS, which means you should have some working knoweldge of CSS already before you pick it up. This isn't a book that teaches you to know CSS, it teaches you to master it.

Andy covers the stuff that will supplement your existing knowledge. He doesn't waste time telling you about the difference between a class and an ID, or the value of shorthand. What he does tell you is why some margins collapse in some browsers and not in others, and how to fix the problem. He briefly explains the attribute selector, but goes right into how and when you might want to use it.

The chapter I found the most valuable to me was the section on forms and tables. Being primarily concerned with layout and text, I haven't had to spend a lot of time looking at data, whether it's being input (form) or output (table). Again, Andy doesn't spend too much time talking about the details of creating a form or a table, but he doesn explain how to style each section of data with real-world examples and backup ideas, or alternatives to his style.

I especially love the last two chapters, where Andy let's Cameron Moll and Simon Collison have at it with a couple of design, applying some of the things Andy talks about in the book. It's awesome to get their perspective, and it adds a ton of credibility to what Andy has to say.

I recommend this book to anyone who has a firm grasp of CSS already and wants to take it further. If you're not completely comfortable with CSS, you might want to check out some other resources first. Or... just be aware that you might not get some added explanation to Andy's techniques because he assumes you already know.

If you are a web developer or designer and haven't read this book yet, you are cheating your employer for the extra time you spend, and you are cheating yourself. Doing web dev without the knowledge of this book is like repairing an automobile with a pair of pliers. It's not the easiest way to get things done.

The mystery of why some divs don't hold their size, why they don't stay in place, how to get divs to wrap, and then more importantly, stop wrapping.

Yes, you'll learn how to make web 2.0 looking tabs, and rounded corner boxes. But you can find that code on the Internet. You get this book so you can understand HOW that stuff works.

I worked with this book for about 4 days over the holidays playing with CSS. When it initially arrived, I was suprised that it was only about 1/2" thick. The first two chapters are basically a recap of CSS at the upper /intermediate level.

I really wouldn't recommend this book for someone that wants to learn CSS, but rather, this book should be used for those who are looking for a reference on how to deal with specific browser issues( especially IE ) and CSS.

There are two major issues that I do have with this book. One, the author tosses out bits and pieces of CSS source code, but never includes the source code in its entirety. You can, of course, download the complete source code from the authors site. The problem with this is that if you have the full source, but the book only explains specific elements, you may become lost when viewing the full source.

Second, I belive that the author could have included more detailed information on real world problems when dealing with visual layouts. For example, CSS has nifty features like being able to place a border around a box, something that you have to do with spacers when using tables. However, coming from a table based layout world, you can split a table in half, and in the bottom right column stick in a footer that will "float" with the contents of the left column, something that seems to be a bit of a challenge to do. Yes, maybe I need to go back a step and find another book that details this information, but from the books description, I came to believe that these types of scenarios would be discussed.

Nearly every page of the book deals with CSS and how IE needs a hack to display properly. It almost makes the reader feel over consumed by the fact that CSS is just lovely, but "I" need to keep a complete journal on everything to include to make CSS work with IE. Actually, the author should just come out with a pocket reference book named "The Complete CSS Hacks Pocket Reference" - that nearly sums up what this book is about.

I'll probably stick this book on the shelf, as I know it will come in handy at some point when dealing with specific problems that I may encounter with CSS and those pesky IE issues. Overall, the book should simply be named "How to make IE display CSS properly" rather than CSS Mastery.

Well, maybe I don't know everything there is to know about CSS, but I totally refurbished the look and feel of my web site with the help of this book alone.

In particular, I brought a web site that looked like it was done in the "stone age" of the Internet (you know, the 1990's) into the 21 century with a state-of-the-industry look and feel -- while preserving the brand identity -- with this book alone.

I had never used CSS at all before, and I accomplished this during my "down time" in a week.

If you are new to CSS and want to get up to speed quickly, this is the book for you!

To my web designer friends who are ready to move beyond DreamWeaver/GoLive and start doing things the "right" way, I have been recommending Dan Cederholm's "Web Standards Solutions" as the best beginner's CSS and HTML guide. I also tell them that they should buy this book, CSS Mastery, at the same time and start reading it once they have absorbed all of W.S.S.

CSS Mastery doesn't QUITE cover enough of the basics of applying CSS to HTML for it to qualify as a beginner's book. However, it does such an incredible job of covering every possible aspect of designing with CSS that it makes the perfect intermediate book.

When beginning to learn web design using pure XHTML and CSS, there is a lot of ground to cover, especially if you are used to working with tables. You can either spend countless hours online searching for all the tricks and work-arounds necessary to effectively use CSS, or you can buy this book and find them all in one place.

Great book. This covers more advanced topics like hack management and teaches frontend developers to work around known browser bugs. Andy Budd does a great job explaining the "hasLayout" issues and proposes workable solutions. One thing of interest was the remote rollovers that use CSS - the CSS version of image maps.

He also does a great job keeping "code" consilidation as an ongoing, underlying premise throughout the book. He uses a few examples of combining classes, which help keep the (X)HTML and CSS bloat factor down to a minimum.

The idea of fluid or liquid layouts is taken one step further than other books on CSS. He focuses on making all elements within the site fluid, not just the text and parent containers. With the methods taught in this book, your images will also respond to the size of the browser window. Nice touch.

He discusses advanced topics in a manner that are easily digestable. We saw a British Invasion in the 60's with the Beatles. It looks like we may have another British invasion now - in the world of web design and web standards. He is one of many outstanding developers/authors from England who are rising up in the web arena.