The Essential Guide to CSS and HTML Web Design (Paperback)

by Craig Grannell (Author)
Key Phrases: returning wheel, ornare dolor, amet rhoncus ornare, Internet Explorer, Times New Roman, Courier New (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
The Essential Guide to CSS and HTML Web Design is a special book—it will tell you all you need to know to design great web sites that are standards compliant, usable, and look great, but not overwhelm you with waffle, theory, and obscure details. It is designed to be invaluable to you, whatever stage you are at in your career, with a mixture of practical tutorials and reference material—beginners will quickly pick up the basics, while more experienced web designers and developers will keep returning to the book again and again to recap on techniques they maybe haven't used for a while, or look up properties, attributes and other details. It is destined to become a close friend, adopting a permanent place on your desk. It starts off by giving a brief introduction to the internet, and the broad area of web design, before diving straight in to HTML and CSS basics, reusing code, other best practices. It then focuses on all the most important areas of a successful web site—typography, images, navigation, tables, layouts, forms and feedback (including ready made PHP scripts for you to use,) and browser quirks, hacks and bugs. The book is completely up-to-date, covering support of the newest standards in all the latest browsers, including IE 7 and Firefox 2. The last chapter of the book provides several case studies for you to dissect and learn from, including all the most popular web site archetypes—a blog, a store front, a corporate home page, and an online gallery. Then the book is rounded off with several detailed reference appendices covering CSS, HTML, Color references, entities, and more, meaning that any details you need to look up are close at hand.

• This book will teach you everything you need to know to create professional CSS and HTML web sites
• Up to date &emdash; covering support of the newest standards in all the latest browsers, including IE 7 and Firefox 2
• Includes practical real world tutorials, essential reference sections, and case studies.

What you'll learn

• The basics of HTML and CSS web design
• How to implement effective layouts, tables, images, navigation, forms and typography on web sites
• How to deal with cross browser issues, including quirks, bugs, and hacks on IE 7 (and older versions,) Firefox, Safari, Opera, and all other major browsers.
• How to make sure your sites are both usable and accessible
• How to implement several different styles of web front-end, through several complete case studies, including a blog, a store front, and an online gallery
• Detailed References are also provided so you don't need to learn every little detail of CSS and HTML

About the Author
Craig was trained in the fine arts, but later became immersed in digital media, showing videos and multimedia work at leading international media festivals. The web caught his attention in 1995, and he now divides his time between creating websites, writing for various web and design-related magazines, and working on his eclectic Veer Musikal Unit audio project. Information, downloads, music, movies and dancing trees can be found at his website, Snub Communications (www.snubcommunications.com). Craig is a co-author of the original Foundation Dreamweaver MX from friends of ED, and also Dreamweaver MX Design Projects, from glasshaus.

Product Details

• Paperback: 600 pages
• Publisher: friends of ED (November 12, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590599071
• ISBN-13: 978-1590599075
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #14,917 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding CSS design coverage, December 26, 2007

By	John Woods "TObject" (San Diego, CA, United States) - See all my reviews

The CSS and HTML Web Design book builds on the excellent earlier title by the same author. The new book is larger, it contains more examples; a lot of the examples are presented in a step-by-step manner. The new examples overall are trickier than old examples which, for better or worse, tended to gravitate towards the academic side of web design rather than real life requirements often imposed upon website builders.

After general introductions, the main sections of this book consist of chapters dedicated to styling text, images, navigation, tables, page layouts, forms, and putting everything together when building complete websites. A special place in the book takes the chapter on dealing with browser quirks. This is a very important chapter that teaches how to deal with browser compatibility issues; it is especially relevant as some of the examples from other chapters do not work as expected in Internet Explorer versions 6 or earlier.

At the core of this book are HTML/XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), but the author also takes dives into various web technologies such as mail form scripts, PHP, JavaScript, and even mentions Ruby On Rails. There is practically no information on ASP.NET, but the web design lessons from this book are applicable to any server technology.

The book appendix contains handy references of most important XHTML and CSS elements and attributes, character encoding tables, web color guide, and information on browsers and recommended software.

The CSS and HTML Web Design is an excellent title containing a wealth of information useful to website designers of any level.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent css/html design guide, February 25, 2008

By	artlmntl (USA) - See all my reviews

The author promises this book is different. I suppose it is, thanks to the author's friendly and comprehensive approach to the material. This is a surprisingly complete guide for beginning and intermediate CSS designers with a lot of useful answers to practical design problems. For instance, many books discuss how to write a form, but this book tells you how to write a mail form, including the fact that the form won't do anything without script support and where to find that support. It's that level of detail that sets this book apart.

As one would expect, the author begins with the basics, discussing CSS and its benefits. Then, he talks about typography and working with type before moving on to images. He even includes a brief discussion of color theory. He shows how to display random images using both JavaScript and PHP and provides an exhaustive discussion of links and navigation, including some discussion of accessibility. Of course, he discusses tables and the box model before moving on to forms and page testing. He has a coherent discussion of IE issues and using conditionals to call version-specific style sheets. He moves on to discuss creation of an online storefront and business websites, ending with useful XHTML, entities, and CSS references. The book is over 500 pages with many code examples.

I'm sure there are advanced designers who don't need this book; but for the beginner, this book is an excellent place to start. For the intermediate designer, this is a very good reference. I really like Stylin' with CSS: A Designer's Guide (2nd Edition) (Voices That Matter) for the author's presentation of information and the book's attractive physical design; but if I am objective and fair, Craig Grannell's "Essential Guide" is the better book. Grannell supplies more information in greater depth over the entire span of CSS design. So, beginning and intermediate designers who buy this book will not be disappointed. Thanks for reading.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Definately worth purchasing., May 17, 2008

By	Greyproc (Colorado) - See all my reviews

The short review: I downloaded this off a torrent; I was so impressed with it, that I'm buying it hard copy. It's definately one of those books that works well for a quick reference.

The long review: This book probably isn't for absolute gurus, simply because there's too much explanation. I'd probably recommend "The Ultimate CSS Reference" if you've already got a firm foundation and just need a quick reference that you can flip through faster than you can load a pdf from your flash drive.

In fairness, though, this book covers more than CSS; it takes the absolute beginner from the basics to a point where they presumably can google for what they need. I picked this up to get up to date on doing web design, after taking over a decade long haitus from it. I was sold by page 6, where the author explained why he wasn't going to go into using WYSIWYG tools. I was further sold by the _lack_ of an IE centric approach, which I've seen other books use. (One of which went so far as to say that Firefox and Opera weren't worth wasting time designing for, because they comprise such a small percentage of user's browsers.) Craig takes the opposite approach and stresses compatibility heavily.

If you're an absolute beginner, I'm not sure this book will be a good fit for you: it tends to present tags only once, and then flesh out actual usage, without covering every possible attribute of them.

However, if you're somewhat familiar with doing web sites, and especially if you did it in the bad old days, this book is an absolute godsend. The writing style is pleasing, and the book is organized such that it's easy to read it cover to cover and not get bored. The examples tend to be well illustrated, and the graphics save having to actually load the code to see the end result.

Frankly, I was impressed enough with this book to make it the first technical book I've actually _bought_ in years. While it's readable in digital form (which tends to be my preferred method), it almost demands being had in hardcopy. Or, to put it another way, it allowed me to close the 20+ tabs I had open to [...]CSS pages, as well as the multiple Google searches. :-)

The only people who might not benefit from this book are the true experts; if you're so familiar with CSS that you can calculate margin offsets in under 2 seconds, for a four column page with 20+ divs, then it's likely you need something like The Ultimate CSS Reference. Even so, the real world site examples at the end might still give you some food for thought.

I can't think of any gripe about this book, so, I'll just nitpick: the sheep images used for the img tag demonstrations were too Euro-centric. I'd of much rather preferred llamas.