Customer Reviews

Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content from Presentation

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

 

 

This is a solid book for the *serious* beginning or intermediate Web worker who recognizes that CSS is -and will be- a technique essential to their career.

The authors do a great service in emphasizing the role of proper HTML structure. Without that understanding, CSS is merely decoration instead of an integral aspect of Web-building.

The authors make more effort to deal with backwards compatibility issues (meaning the decrepit Netscape 4) than I think necessary. But at no point do they cater to that browser. They completely avoid wasteful hacks such as tables for layout and 1-pixel .gif tricks.

The authors guide the reader in all the best modern practices, avoiding the old hacks, to create structurally logical and human-readable code -- code that looks nice and displays in new ways.

It's been a long time coming but finally the right Web coding practices are coming to the fore, with the help of books such as this.

This book is an excellent introduction to CSS; however, I have a few quibbles with it -- hence, the reason for a loss of one star in my rating of the book. My rationale for calling it "an excellent introduction to CSS" is the following:

1. It covers markup and presentational theories -- thus, affording the beginner a good background for understanding the interplay of (X)HTML and CSS.

2. It adequately explains the box model. The explanation is quite clear; however, my quibble with it is that it is not as detailed as the explanation of the box model in Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide. Such detail can be important even to a beginner.

3. It has a chapter on typography and how typographic principles can be enacted in CSS. This chapter is a real boon to beginners and more advanced users of CSS. Since typographic CSS can be implemented without wrecking a design in every modern browser, knowledge pertaining to how to use it well is important.

4. It offers some troubleshooting techniques. This chapter is not as nearly helpful as the other chapters, but it is good to see such a chapter in a CSS book since the browser manufacturers still have partial and/or buggy implementations of CSS. (Note: the bugs are not all that common.)

5. It provides clear explanations of the CSS properties and selectors that it does cover.

I have covered some of my quibbles, but essentially, they all pertain to not enough detail or coverage of CSS properties and selectors. The book is not aimed at being a complete reference. It is written as a tutorial and, consequently, cannot include the entirety of CSS. I praise it for being a tutorial and limiting the coverage of CSS for beginners. That is why I highly recommend this book for beginners. However, a serious user of CSS will need to also purchase Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide and Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web, 2nd Edition to complete her education about CSS and to pick up the details that this book excludes.

Dabblers in web design may skip this book for now. But if you are serious about investing your time and energy in web design and development, particularly if you are still mixing CSS (Style Sheets) and HTML markup unsystematically according to what seems to patch up your site's function (mea culpa), you owe it to yourself to check this out. Even if you just browse the first two chapters standing in a book store (sorry, authors), READ IT!

Ordinarily, I would not have cared much about another 'history of the web' except that theirs (chapter 1) explained WHY and HOW changes from simple HTML to more efficient developments (esp. CSS) can vastly SIMPLY and empower the way your web design proceeds, enhancing: 1) accessibility of your site, 2) speediness of your site, 3) and best of all speed of your development and revision work.

Although I agree that some exposure to CSS (even just from an introductory web design book) will make the going easier when you read this volume, from Briggs et al. you will finally learn the principles of WHY you save time and money by beginning your design with CSS (instead of just HTML/XHTML) and HOW the units of CSS work. It's like getting your first real understanding of how to do (virtually) all your work on a computer - when you had been clunking along trying to hang on to the familiarity of a typewriter for half your tasks.

Finally, I have to express a real appreciation for the thoroughness of the presentations and the humanity of the writing style - no ranting, no hype - just thoughtful analysis of the state of this art/science and how to cope with its quirks and potentials. I enjoyed their tasteful, wry humor, agreeably sprinkled where appropriate - and the big laugh I got when I decided to look at the authors' pictures. (Seriously, guys, why did you let the publishers use mug shots? ;)

Overall, this is an outstanding text for learning CSS and how to appropriately use it with HTML and XHTML. It is perfect for someone who is already comfortable with basic HTML markup and would like to leverage the various advantages of CSS. The book's only weak point is its coverage of the CSS box model. Arguably one of the more difficult parts of learning CSS, the chapter on the box model makes only passing reference to the float property, which is used very frequently in CSS layouts. Other examples in the box chapter were overly simplified and did not give much more info than I've found online.

The chapters on the basic syntax of CSS are very good and the typography coverage is outstanding.

This book has a great number of positives.

The chapters on typography and selectors is beyond compare and the discussion on 'flow' within a page works should be required reading for anyone who takes web site development seriously, i.e. this book probably isn't for the Loving_Hands_Web_Site_Studio.com crowd.

The only 'slight' negative I would make is that the first 78 pages are yet another recitation on what browsers 'should' be doing and how terrible that this hasn't happened - yada, yada, yada.

The CSS purist crowd drone on and on about this topic daily, weekly, endlessly when responding to any legitimate question about implementing CSS on their web sites, newsgroups, e-mail lists - enough already. It's beyond tedious.................

I give the book 5 stars with no reservations but I'd like to see a future edition sans the first section - it's not like this information is new or even relevant. Browsers are what they are - deal with it.

In an easy-to-read 279 pages, the authors guide the reader through the concept of separating content from presentation in web design. The authors advocate the use of Cascading Style Sheets to achieve this objective.

In addition to making a strong case for CSS, these authors provide many practical examples of how to implement CSS based upon their experience using the technology in a cross-browser environment. The authors clearly demonstrate their understanding of the "real-world" of web development by addressing may of the issues web developers will face if they decide to implement CSS. The authors are not "stary-eyed" evangelists - rather they appear pragmatic and realistic about the use of this technology (which is actually refreshing). There are a plethora of code samples and the book includes a detailed chapter on typography (more than you'll probably ever want to know). Overall, it's a very well written book that addresses CSS in a comprehensive and cohesive manner. Great Job!

Over the years, CSS has helped change the way information is displayed on the web. Since its inception, CSS has evolved into a full-featured language capable of formatting not only text but almost all elements of a web site such as tables, lists, and more. CSS is not the easiest language to learn, but a book such as this helps.

Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content from Presentation by Owen Briggs, Steven Champeon, Eric Costello, Matt Patterson, is a great way to not only be introduced to CSS but also to learn the details that will ultimately help you to design or convert existing sites using the CSS language. The book introduces you to simple CSS formatting involving text and other web elements such as lists, tables, and more. After relishing some of the simple formatting concepts, the book guides you through the more complicated process of creating layouts using CSS.

Beyond direct applications of CSS, the authors explain some subtle issues that you will encounter while using CSS. While CSS is standardized by the W3C organization, the implementation of CSS varies across various browsers. The authors do an excellent job of covering some of the inconsistencies and how to resolve them. You are provided specific examples of code, and you are also given code that would help older browsers into displaying CSS-based layouts.

The book also takes interesting breaks from explaining CSS concepts and provides insights into unique features about CSS that are cool to know! One such section, explains how to make your pages downgrade gracefully and display properly in text-only browsers.

The various authors present the information very clearly, and you, towards the end of the book, will have learned how to not only use but also implement CSS in your design solutions. To aid you in your quest of applying what you have learned, the authors provide sample projects and brief guidelines before sending you off on a full filled CSS coding journey.

This is a great book for beginners and advanced users of CSS to learn and reference from.

This book's first chapter is about the only one that is clear. The rest of the chapters are unfortunately not well presented and structured. The examples and the CSS examples are laid out in very confusing ways. It is very often difficult to tell which snippet of code matches which screenshot. In that respect, chapter 7 is a nightmare.
Also cruelly missing from the book are a list of all possibly attributes for each property.
You will not be able to learn CSS entirely from this book. You will have to either buy another more comprehensive book, or to use Web tutorials.

A book that has something to say to beginners and experts alike. The authors managed to condensate a huge amount of informations, both on CSS theory and practical implementation. The chapters written by Steve Champeon alone are worth the price

This book is very well written. It is the first technical book that I have read cover-to-cover in years.