Customer Reviews

Core CSS (2nd Edition)

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Boy, this thing is big! If you are interested in using CSS on your Web site, this is a really good guide as to what code you can use now with the current browser standards. The info relating to the Mozilla browser (which will become Netscape Navigator 6.0) is handy as well.

The one thing I like about this book over the O'Reilly book on the same subject is that it dives a lot into CSS2, giving me a head's up on features to come. Neat.

Somebody else commented about the lack of info on external style sheets. That's a dumb comment because you can only learn how to write an external style sheet if you know the individual bits of code used. And the book *does* mention how to use external style sheets -- but most of the examples are inline, which is easier to illustrate.

Thumbs up on this book!

Just a few notes about the SECOND edition (of which the publisher was kind enough to send me a review copy): Judging from descriptions by reviewers of the first edition, this seems to be a considerably enhanced second edition, addressing complaints described here.

The book is easy to look through and use as a reference. The preface describes the target audiences as already "web authors" who want to become more effective. If you are completely new to CSS, the book does a nice step-by-step education of the ins and outs of CSS. However, if it had been my first CSS book (instead of 6th), I'm not sure that I would have had the motivation to learn how to convert all my planning from simple HTML markup to CSS; that I got most persuasively from Owen Briggs' "Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content from Presentation" ISBN 1904151043, which I highly recommend to anyone still just mixing CSS into their HTML for occasional convenience. Nor is the writing engaging enough to carry along a reader who is not already convinced that they have GOT to learn CSS.

"Core CSS" does provide pretty comprehensive reference material, although some of it will not become "pragmatic"(the stated objective) for a few years -- e.g., all the material on CSS-3. The author usually includes the caveat "proposed" before the term CSS-3 ( the standards are still developing). Three years from now when browsers start to attend to CSS-3 standards, this material will apply (or be outdated if final standards different). Anyway, for CSS newcomers the inclusion of all the not-yet-applicable CSS-3 material will probably be more confusing and distracting than useful. More "pragmatic" to me would have been the inclusion in the extensive browser-compatibility tables of Apple's Safari browser (i.e., Mac OS X). Safari's user base is closing in on 10 million; it is the fastest and arguably most convenient browser yet designed; and although Mac users are a minority, their ranks include above-average incomes (and hence web shopping, etc.) and a preponderance of designers (including web).

My other concern about attempting to present "Core CSS" as an all-in-one CSS is that it does NOT have examples of how to WORK AROUND the documented quirks introduced by the pervasive disregard by browser designers for CSS standards. Here is where ANY CSS designer needs to study a copy of Eric Meyer's "Eric Meyer on CSS: Mastering the Language of Web Design." The latter volume enables a designer to see how/why to employ CSS from scratch in designing pages/sites and special strategies for REdesigning to maximize efficiency for author and visitors.

I'm not one to encourage monopolies, yet I must say to the beginner that once Meyer's volume has given you the strategies to design with CSS, Meyer's reference volume (0072131780 - Cascading Style Sheets 2.0: Programmer's Reference) continues to be handier to work with as a daily-basis reference than "Core CSS" - even including basic conceptual frameworks such as the "box model" in a way that helps your planning (despite being two years older). Although "Core CSS" includes some screen shots, they do not offer as strong a conceptual underpinning for beginning one's work with CSS. My apologies to the publisher for a tepid review of Core CSS: it is improved over the first edition; but it doesn't amount to either an effective introduction for beginners or a comprehensive 2004 reference for the experienced.

I bought the book hoping to find everything I needed to know about CSS 1 & 2. What I got was not exactly what I expected. The book is very informative on compatibility issues between at least 3 of the major browsers. This part was well done and I have no complaints with that.

What I do have a problem with is the fact that the whole book, every example for every property, was completely embedded into the HTML itself. Their was a slight reference to externally described CSS but no examples to follow. The idea of the sheets is to set a number of parameters for most or all of your pages to follow. Embedding them into the HTML every time defeats the purpose. Also their were some mentions to multiple options techniques that never had any kind of example or visual of any kind to follow so you can see how this could be useful. In that sense the beginner user would be completely lost on something that can be helpful down the road.

After going through the entire book and learning maybe 5% more than I already knew (from online free tutorial sites) I realized that it would better to just go online and search the free sites if I have any questions. Their are tons of people out there who can answer your questions a lot better than this book can.

It wasn't a complete waste, but certainly not worth the money I paid for it. Not a good learning tool, hardly a reference guide. If your new to this you might just want to go else where to learn it. If you're a veteran believe me when I say that you'll be bored before you make it through the first 3-4 chapters.

If all of the information in this book was re-written to exclude all of the redundant and worthless muck, it could have easily fit onto 50 pages. As it is, the author managed to strech it into eight HUNDRED pages. Greenpeace should be all over this guy for the monumental waste of trees.

There *is* informative information, but you really have to dig to get to it. The entire text is truly an excersize in copy and pasting. The table of contents alone is over twenty pages. The index (which is really what we use) is only ten pages. A good example of the amazing bloat in this book are the pages on "padding". The primary properties are padding, padding-left, padding-right, padding-top, padding-bottom. Any sensible author would have given a comprehensive description of one of the properties, and then breifly stated the obvious difference between left and right. However, two pages are dedicated to each property. Each two-page description is virtually identical to each other, substituting "right" for "left" where appropriate, etc.

Since it's been on my shelf, I've gone to it occasionally for quick reference, and it's painfully difficult to find anything specific. Far better references can be found on the web for free.

The index in this book is a joke and as far as I'm concerned it renders this book useless as a reference.

The book didn't really teach me anything, and it makes for a lousy reference. I do not recommend it to either new or experienced CSS designers. Far better free resources exist on the web.

There's little discussion of external stylesheets, and instead it focuses on inline CSS (which is useful, yes, but not as useful as it could be).

The reference material in the back of the book doesn't refer you to related items, doesn't provide examples, and doesn't refer you to the pages in the main text which describe the reference item in more detail.

Prentice Hall has artfully concealed the lack of content in this book by providing a "Browser Compatibility" section at the end of every sub-section of the book. This pads every subsection of the book by 2/3 of a page. To pick an example randomly, Chapter 4 runs from pp. 53-80 (27 pages). There are nine of these "Browser Compatibility" pads, taking up around 6 pages in the chapter. This suggests that the book should really be about 80% as long as it is -- or, god forbid, have another big chunk of missing content to fix some of the lacks above.

Last week, my employer told me to redesign several online html templates used to provide product documentation to customers. The new design needs to use html today, but be ready to support XML in the future. I decided that css style sheets were the way to go, but I know little about how to implement them. I am not a programmer -- just a "power-amateur." I needed help. My local Barnes and Noble had one book in the whole MonsterStore about css -- It was "Core CSS." I bought it because I needed it immediately.
"Core CSS" turned out to be a well-written, well-organized, thorough, nearly-error-free book, which surprised me. It also answered several small questions I had, which made it worth buying -- but it would have been very difficult to use, if I hadn't had some experience with web programming already.
"Core CSS" lacks four things: 1) a really, really good introductory chapter that shows me exactly what css is and how it is used on an html page, 2) some really good two-page examples of "best-practice" css stylesheet implementations ( I am baffled that the book lacks this), 3)a MUCH better discussion of inheritance -- when, why and HOW to do it, and 4)a separate chapter on web page design basics using css.
Still, I was surprised at how good this book really is. It manages to very clearly and painlessly summarize a hash of difficult W3C/Microsoft/Netscape/GodKnowsWho Specifications, and provides the most consciencious reference to browser support that I could have hoped for -- and that's important, given the state of browser support and the complete obliviousness of Employers who ask "power-user" employees to support everything their customers use. This is a fine, useful book. I expect the Third Edition to be a classic.

This is book is the best book I found so far about CSS. There is one chapter for each Major property. One chapter for Fonts talking about how to set the Family, Size, Style, Variant, and Weight. Another chapter for Color and another for Borders and Units and Text and Boxes and the list go on and on. If you want to know about any particular property you'll find it and understand it in less than 2 minutes, gauranteed!! Personally I read the whole book in 1 week and learned a lot. I already know HTML and JavaScript very well and this book helped me to manage all my styles in one single file, I then included this file in all my web pages. A single change in this file will work for all web pages no matter how many they are. It's like magic! The preivew that was talking about inline vs external CSS is totally wrong. If you know how to write inline then you know external other wise sorry dude you don't know CSS.

Summary: This book is for people who want a very simple and easy way to find out about any CSS property. I recommend that the person who buy this book should know JavaScript and of course HTML and basic CSS will be even better.

I reviewed the first edition and gave it low marks for being a pedestrian attempt which did not convey the controversies and attractions of CSS.

The new edition is better organized and is up to date with information on actual browser implementations -- and includes the IE extensions, a touchy but valuable subject often avoided by others.

When you've gone down the long road of learning HTML, then some kind of programming, then XML, you eventually look back and see how things have changed. Once you appreciate how XHTML can really separate content from presentation (and you know how valuable that is after using XML), it becomes clear that you need to know CSS.

Core CSS goes through everything, and it does it very thoroughly, even on properties that are essentially repeats of each other (i.e., margin-left and margin-right). The basic core concepts regarding the box model, floating and such are all well covered with examples, and each property throughout the book tells you exactly what the "gotchas" are in the various browsers out there. The frustration that might come from design using div tags and CSS can at least be directed toward the browser makers and not the standard itself.

The only minor shortcoming, not worthy enough of dropping my five-star score, is a rather brief example of doing a "table" with div tags. Still, it's not enough to really sweat over.

I keep the book on my desk all of the time when doing layout and design. You will too after you breeze relatively quickly through its thousand pages.