Customer Reviews

Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide

5 star:		(40)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

There were lots of great comments on this book on how wonderful it was. Based on those comments, I purchased the book at a local bookstore.

Using Dreamweaver as my design tool, I thought there might be a book where I can learn more about CSS. I already own a couple of good books, but they are light on CSS, and nothing is indexed. I was hoping this book was a 'reference' on every CSS property for CSS1 & CSS2 with a variety of examples. That is exactly what Eric Meyer's book fails to deliver.

For new authors, this book will get you started into the wondeful world of using style sheets - Eric delivers his examples with clear dictation in an editorial style. It's an excellent starting point with good examples and solid explainations on how CSS works.

If you are like me however, an experienced webguy, pass on this book. It does not have a complete list of EVERY CSS property, nor are the examples given robust. The book is written in editorial format, flowing from one topic to the next without really getting into the meat of CSS. It's as if Eric wanted to say something on everything, but in doing so, he limited is ability to offer in-depth explainations of each property and it's power/flexibility.

To sum up, yes, this book is a good tutorial, but NOT a definitive guide. Maybe Eric should of called it the CSS: Definitive Starting Guide To Get You Going. Next time, I'll actually take time to skim through the book at my local computer book store.

N.B. Are all these praises for this book from the author, publisher, or friends of the author to help sell the book? I have my suspicions because a lot of the comments sound 'canned'. Hopefully my review gets published to prove this is not the case.

EVR.

This book's problem... the publishing house didn't assign an industry expert as content editor but published it 'as received from author' (though maybe they DID spellcheck it). I say that based on the fact that over the past 35 years, I've earned a tidy little sideline sum as a content editor for various publishing houses. (I am also an sgml expert and have built about 6000 webpages in the past decade, most by hand, some using Cold Fusion, so I am also an HTML/CSS/JavaScript/XML, etc. 'expert'.)
This book has too much author me me me me-ing (kinda like my review, heh heh) and not enough clear, concise explanations as to how CSS works and what problems might be encountered in which browsers if you use css to replace tables for page layout.

I recommend a css beginner go to w3schools site. They have a beginner's css course that is quite good, for the basics. Plus they allow you to try out the css in a browser. It's not a full-on course, but it IS a good beginning and it's free. You should know HTML before you take the css course. Also, you can go to lissaexplains for tidbits of css info such as how 'div' works, etc. Then just start building a site for the practice. If you can't think of a website idea (if you are a beginner, that can be a difficult thing... the design of a website), and you have access to 2002 or newer Microsoft applications, just use one of the office programs (Word or Publisher) to generate a couple of basic webpages, then view the template in a browser, and printout the pages. Don't look at the 'view source' of the generated Microsoft webpage as all that baloney microsoft code will freak you out. Then try to duplicate the webpage layout by writing your own html/css code... after you have learned css at w3schools, etc. You will discover you'll need at least TWO stylesheets for your webpages as css works differently in various browser. Don't worry about it, w3schools will explain the basics. Generally speaking, you'll need one stylesheet for Firefox/Mozilla, the other for MSIE and Opera. But don't waste your money on this book. It's not a beginner's book though it purports to be, and the author, well, he really needs to teach a couple of nightschool courses on css, using his book as the courseware. The questions that the night school (aka 'highly motivated') students will ask over and over and over will quickly enlighten him as to what's wrong with his book and give him a little needed humility. (Teaching nightschool CompSci sure worked for me, heh heh.)

HOWEVER, if you want a book then I recommend anything by Danny Goodman. He's a good 'explainer'. His book (ISBN: 0-596-00316-1) Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference, 2nd Edition is a good book to have by your side as you are learning web building.

As a WebMaster, I try to keep up with the latest trends in web design. When I first heard about style sheets, I cringed because I thought "Oh great..some new complicated thing to learn." However, once I started reading this book, I began to realize the power of style sheets and how they make designing elements on a web site much easier. While small sites like the ones I design may not need Cascading Style Sheets, I realized very quickly what a pain it could be to have to change the color or font for a H1 or P element on a site containing 50 to 100 pages or more!

The book covers a number of different subjects, including browser compatability issues (after all, there doesn't seem to be any elements that all browsers support quite the same way), along with element units and values, fonts and text properties, colors, and visual formatting. I now realize the fascinating things you can do on a web site with the help of style sheets.

As with other O'Reilly books, there's a wealth of resources in the Appendixes, including a Resources appendix and a sample Style Sheet, done in HTML 2.0 (It always helps to see what a "sample" sheet looks like in order to further understand what all the element attributes mean).

An excellent reference guide to Cascading Style Sheets.

While O'Reilly books are almost always good (though sometimes dry and lacking in examples), this book is off the scale in its usefulness and excellence. The most valuable parts of the book explain browser compatibility issues and offers tips, tricks and solutions for getting css stylesheets to work in a real-world environment. Any serious web developer should have this book on their shelf.

These days, with applications such as "Flash" and "Frontpage" being used to put all the bells and whistles on applications, most wouldn't give a second thought to this book. This is unfortunate. This book is without a doubt the most important book anyone who has a background in HTML can pick up. It deals in great depth with the W3C CSS 1.0 standard, which allows the web designer to customize and standardize their pages to the minutest detail. I was surprised at how comprehensive this book was since it showed me how to do everything from creating lists bulleted with custom images to layering text/images on top of one another. The use of external cascading style sheets allowed me to create elaborate "standard" pages that could be updated by merely changing the stylesheet file. This concept is carried further in eXtensible Style Sheet language (XSL) and therefore is probably the best introduction to XML, before actually beginning to read up on XML! One thing in particular (among many!) about this book that I liked was the extensive use of screenshots to illustrate the effects of various scripts, something often missing from O'Reilly books. After reading this excellent tutorial/reference, read "JavaScript, the Definitive Guide", and "Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference" to learn how to create powerful client-side web pages (pop-up images, pop-down menus, etc.). Throw out FrontPage and really begin developing!

de·fin·i·tive
adj.
1. Precisely defined or explicit.
2. Authoritative and complete

Can this be said to be a definitive guide?

No doubt Mr. Meyer knows his trade and is a respected individual on the subject of CSS. Anyone who has cut their teeth on CSS knows that what is written in theory, is sometimes fallacy in implementation. This goes true in the various browser interpretations of the CSS language and the different behaiviors each presents.

This is where CSS: The Definitive Guide should have stepped in to fill that void. There should be browser compatability charts showing quirks mode, standards mode, and all the different behaiviors of IE 4/5/6, Opera, Netscape, Firefox, etc.

Authoritative? Yes unless someone else can explain it better.
Explicitly defined to be understood? Somewhat.
Complete? Not really.

Still, this is a good book to have on your shelf just in case you get bored reading dry technical specifications.

As someone who has never using Cascading Style Sheets in the past, I never realized just how much work this language could save me. I am still amazed at the fact that I can control every aspect of an entire webpage regardless of size by editing various components of the style sheet file.

Never before have my website been as error-free and consistent as they are now. Using CSS2, I was able to ensure that each element of my sites is consistent and correctly displayed on almost all web browsers. I no longer spend hours each month chasing down what I used to call "code flaws" that would cause a section of the page to be improperly displayed in various browsers.

Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide is an excellent resource for anyone who wishes to learn to utilize this time-saving language to automate and centralize the task of website maintenance.

Written with a very straight-forward, no-bull approach - I found this book to be a very easy read. The examples provided along the way connected the dots and the appendixes were extremely helpful as a syntax reference. The book is easy to understand even for someone who is not an expert and takes the user from knowing nothing to mastery in just a few short hours.

In less than two hours, I had created a basic style sheet that effectively managed the formatting of my website and put me back in control. Over the next 20 to 30 hours, I had tweaked the style sheet to control every aspect of every page of the entire site and rolled the feature out across the entire site - which consists of more than 2500 separate HTML files or fragment files.

I now estimate that I have 10 additional hours every week to focus on my business and not tweaking my website constantly.

If you're looking for a book that will teach you how to actually use CSS, you'll be disappointed by this book. If you're looking for a book that goes into great detail about what CSS can do in theory, you'll love this book. But be warned, before you read a section, you should scan ahead to make sure there's no warning that says, "Internet Explorer for Windows through IE6, the most recent version as of this writing, does not support [whatever...]" The book wastes a huge amount of time describing things that are not supported. And these warnings are at the end of sections.

In chapter 1, the author does a great job of convincing the reader why style sheets should be used in place of HTML tags to control the visual presentation of a web page. In chapter 2, he does an equally good job at confusing the reader on how styles work. When I look back at the chapter, everything seems to be explained in great detail. However, the author provides no exercises or mnemonics to help memorize all the intertwining rules about grouping, selectors, structure, inheritance, specificity, and most importantly of course, the cascade. In this book, CSS is presented like mathematics: you must entirely understand the first chapters before going to the next. Even though I did extremely well in math classes and develop web applications for a living, this chapter made my head spin.

The first thing I tried to do with style sheets was to convert some of my web pages to strict HTML by changing my <div align="center"> tags to CSS. According to page 88, the way to do that is with the style "text-align: center;". Of course, this style doesn't center tables, only the text within the table cells. With considerably more digging, I found that "margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" was the way to center a table. Unfortunately, that style doesn't center headings or images. I finally was able to find a combination of both styles that simulate <div align="center">, but I found it only through trial-and-error, not through insight gained from this book. This book needs a chapter on CSS style equivalents to HTML style tags, in more detail than the "CSS in Action" chapter.

Perhaps the problem is that I'm working with the latest versions of the Mozilla and Opera browsers, both of which support CSS2. Unfortunately, this book explains only CSS1, and provides one short chapter in the back on the differences between CSS1 and CSS2. Because CSS2 browsers are becoming popular, CSS2 is what should be described through the book, and differences in CSS1 should be explained as they come up, not in a chapter in the back.

On the positive side, the book does seem to provide enough information that if you memorize the important parts, dig hard, and experiment a lot, you can eventually figure out how to get CSS to do what you want. I hope the second edition makes this memorization, digging, and experimentation a lot easier.

I have read up the most curent available sources for information on CSS. This is the definitive guide on CSS. I have searched high and low for a book of this quality and finally found it.

This book give you more than just bulk information. It breaks everything down and basically builds it back up for you. I don't know how well this book might be for the beginer, but I found it extremly useful.