Customer Reviews

Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web (3rd Edition)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have gotten each edition of this book as it came out -- giving the still valuable previous edition to the most worthy co-worker. This book (whatever edition!) is rightly regarded as one that belongs by the desk of the astute and experienced Web worker.

When the first edition came out, I rejected it for another book on CSS. I figured that a book explaining CSS by the W3C alpha geeks who *created* the CSS recommendation would be too technical and unreadable. I learned how wrong I was. Lie and Bos's classic book turns out to be one of the most readable and clear treatments of CSS you can obtain.

I can agree that if you have a previous edition, there probably is no compelling reason to update. Some explanations have been elaborated and browser compatibility is updated for Firefox. The core value remains the same: simple enough for novices, detailed enough for experts.

Given the relation of the authors to the official work of the W3C, the book speaks with an authority as no other.

If you already have the 2nd edition of this book, don't bother purchasing the 3rd, as little of the content has changed.

Only very light edits have been made to the text. The coding examples remain the same - after six years. The order of the chapters has been slightly rearranged, and two outdated chapters (on WebFonts and aural style sheets) have been dropped. Color illustrations are used less frequently, hurting the clarity of the examples; and the page layout is not as clean. On the positive side, entries in the "CSS quick reference" (on the inside cover) now refer to the correct page numbers in the book. And of course the browser compatability charts, noting which browsers support which CSS features, have been updated: Internet Explorer 6, Firefox 1, Opera 7.2, Safari 1, and the Prince 4 CSS formatter are now covered.

If you have not used previous editions of this book, read through the comments made about the 2nd edition, as much of what was said there still applies here. This remains a decent CSS coding reference, but frankly, I refer to Elizabeth Castro's "HTML for the World Wide Web, 5th edition" far more frequently.

This is a great CSS guide and reference. It has something for all skill levels.

Beforehand I thought the book would only be a technical (code-centered) guide to CSS, but it turned out to contain many practical design tips as well. I would say it is useful for both beginners and advanced website designers. If you're new to CSS, this book gives a great introduction to the subject, and if you've been in the game for a while you'll most likely find there were several handy, nifty little features of CSS 2.1 you didn't know about. (I thought I knew basically what there was to know about CSS, but the book has already tought me several new and useful things.)

The book is logically laid out and divided into chapters. One very useful feature is the complete list of CSS 2.1 properties found on the inside cover, as well as the browser compatibility information listed for each property. (Although I've found the latter to be slightly misleading at times. Specifically, the book claims that Firefox understands the 'quotes' property properly, while it quite obviously doesn't.)

When a developer is in the middle of a project, what is needed is a guidebook that is short, well-written and organized logically. The book must also contain plenty of examples that are specific to the current chapter section, leaving out other confusing cross-references.

Cascading Style Sheets by Lie and Bos does all of the above. The book can be read cover-to-cover, or used as a reference as needed. I rarely had to use the index to find a subject, because the chapters are well-named and stick to their subject. This is rare.

The authors have exceptional credentials, authoring technical and exacting specifications for CSS. Yet they wrote a book that is clear and understandable for us mere mortals. Every web developer should have a copy.

If you are an IT person, or someone with an IT mindset, and you want to get into CSS, this book is for you. This is the best for you. This book does presume knowledge of markup (HTML/XHTML).

However, this book does not cover advanced layout, which was never really included in CSS (there is hope in CSS3). Discussions of layout will need to be found in other resources.

On the other hand, if you are an artsy person who likes to learn by doing, this book is not for you. It would be better if you searched for Eric Meyer on CSS, which takes you through implementing CSS on a project like basis. Eric Meyer on CSS does presume knowledge of markup (HTML/XHTML) however.

ritten by the authors of CSS, at first I found it a bit heavy in dialogue and backgrounds. Not until you open the book to the index does one actually realize the wealth of information in the book. Do not expect this book to show examples of the next great page, but as a resource in trouble shooting it helped explain alot of questions I either was too lazy to look up in Dreamweaver Help or couldnt find the right type of answer elsewhere. My level is pretty much entry intermediate, but with this book, it took me a bit higher. I am getting rid of my introductory CSS books and using this one as my main go to guide.

CSS is covered in detail (20 pages on CSS colour alone) and the explainations are straight forward. The most valuable chapter is "Spaces around boxes". Running over 30 pages, this is a well thumbed section that explained to me where I was going wrong with a layout CSS I was doggedly trying to force to do what I wanted. Once I went through this section, it became clear my folly.

This book now has an honour of being well coffee stained and front and center on my resource shelf.

This book has something other books about CSS cannot have. It was written by authors of CSS itself. This is also reason, why this book concentrates on aspects how CSS works. During reading I have understood some CSS principles I had not been aware of after several years of working with CSS.

You should know that this book contains just a few information about browsers compatibility. It's several years old, so it describe Internet Explorer 6, Firefox 1 or Opera 8 which are really old browsers today!

So if you read this book you will learn about theoretical basics of CSS (and none other book can teach you better than this!), but remember, that about the real-world problems with nowadays browsers you will have to learn from other resources.

I am in a beginning html and css class at a college, and have checked out numerous books from the library on html and css, all of which have their good and bad points. One other recommended book was good only after you got past the introductory 100 pages, which included history of html, as well as touting their friends' books. Too many of the books try to be funny, which is not what you need from a good computer book. I came across this book accidentally at the library. It may be written by "computer geeks," but it explained clearly what CSS is and how it fits in with html, gives all the correct terms for selectors and such (for us new users), tells you when something is case sensitive or not, and gives clear examples of good code and how it will show in a browser. I finally grasped what the em unit is and how and why its used, and the difference between class and ID attributes. My only complaint are the typos, but they were mostly obvious and haven't caused me any problems yet. I got this book at the library, but plan on ordering a copy to keep and highlight!! I think this book is great for beginner through intermediate users.

I was able to read this book from front to back without the compulsion to code during my read through. It is very easy to read and comprehend, an uncommon attribute for a technical book. This single book enabled me to go from simply dabbling in CSS to completely separating presentation from content which is entirely the point of CSS. In fact, I was here tonight looking for a 4th edition. Sadly, it is not [yet] available.

If you are trying to learn CSS this book will definitely get you started. Not a replacement for actually coding though. Written by the guys who started it all and well done overall.