Customer Reviews

Getting Started with CSS

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The best way to get the most out of this CSS book is to work through it chapter by chapter in the right order. You can try to dive in somewhere in the middle but the author makes it clear at the outset that you're going to really benefit by reading everything in the right order. I've already built 3 websites so far before getting my hands on this book. Ideally, you'll have read a book that fully covers HTML/XHTML coding, eg 'Learning Web Design' by Jennifer Niederst Robbins, before diving into this. Web designers would do well to learn the foundations of HTML/XHTML first and then work to get your head around the CSS in this book. This book really gets stuck in to take you through each major concept of CSS. The first chapter is a basic overview but rest assured there's other books on the market that cover the total ins-and-outs of CSS more thoroughly. Eventually you'll want to read something a little more beefy such as 'CSS The Definitive Guide' which is better suited to an experienced web designer. Getting Started with CSS will have you building your website at a good fast pace. Before you know it, you'll have finished a chapter in an hour or two and have a major concept covered.
I own several other popular books on CSS (check out the popular "CSS The Missing Manual'). They all seem to have a major strength in different key areas. In this book, I was able to complete one chapter comfortably in an afternoon and follow each example from start to finish. While I completed the chapter examples, I'd also open up an existing client project and work through it at the same time. Doing this allowed me to fully understand the right order to apply all my CSS rules. As an example, the book teaches you to style text based CSS rules before moving onto images and then backgrounds. My previous efforts of applying CSS was haphazard. I now follow the order specified here and my new websites are styled right. I'm fully aware of what I'm doing with my CSS.
'CSS The Missing Manual' is another popular book you'll want to add to your library too. That fully covers off important subjects such as CSS Specificity, ID Selectors and such at a deeper level so you'll grasp an understanding of CSS theory more fully. However, this book will allow you to work out CSS at a faster pace and you'll be up and running in no time.

This is great book, I know quite abit about css as I have used in making web sites. But I found some things that made some of my coding easier. It is an easy read, and now I feel this is a good reference book, I have some things dog eared to refresh my mind. Keep up the good work David.
What I would like to see is an Getting Started on PHP book by David, read his other dreamweaver books, but still a little in the dark with PHP. Thx for given me the opportunity to read and review this book.

I have no one to blame but myself for purchasing this book. I browsed through it at a book store and the things that I liked about it was that it appeared to provide some nice insights into the some of the nuances and intricacies of CSS, especially in the early sections of the book.

The problem is that when you need a more cohesive narrative to quickly solve a problem, or understand a technique it begins to not so much fail in providing the information, as I am sure the information is there, but the approach is all over the place like the proverbial! My two biggest issues are that the book is literally peppered with grey boxes that are entitled "ExplainED", "AdvancED", "LinkED" - they are exceedingly successful in completely distracting the reader and avoiding getting to the heart of the issues - which of course is the root problem with this book. These boxes contribute very little, if indeed nothing, to the intent of the section or paragraph and could very well be left for the end of the chapter where the poor reader can easily choose to leap forward with the hope of seeking some modicum of relief from the torment.

The second annoyance, is that the distance in text and the number of pages between the statement of the problem and the coherent description of the the solution can be immense - for example, Chapter 4 (page 121) begins with "How can I flow text around images?" with figure 4 giving a very good example of what the problem is that we are trying to solve - well a healthy sprinkling of "AdvancED, and "ExplainED" boxes along with a wealth of other distractions, we finally get to something like the solution on page 150, even then it is not clear it is the same problem we are discussing.

If someone writes another book like this, how about something very simple, a small box with the code pointing to the effect that gets us from the before and after state is step one. The next step is to build upon that base or fundamental piece of knowledge.

Perhaps I am being overly critical because I do know CSS and use it quite extensively, and my frustration comes from knowing the author should have been able to do a much better job.

In summary this is a dreadfully muddled book and have added to the list of books, that when my conscience allows, will pulp and have them recycled.

I've been coding in HTML and CSS as a hobby for about ten years and professionally for the past couple of years.

I wish I knew about this book when it first came out. It is probably the most complete book on CSS I've run across. David Powers is a great teacher and he runs you through the progressive steps of building a webpage using CSS for styling and layout. It gets into fairly advanced stuff pretty quickly and might be best for those with at least a little CSS experience. The fact that there are a few minor errors (some of which I will detail) will also make things slightly more difficult for those using this as their first book on CSS. There are some great sites with info on CSS though, such as htmldog.com and those sites combined with this book will take even a rank beginner to the point of being a true expert. The only thing required is a little time and effort.

Notes:

Chapter 11 is devoted to explaining all kinds of ways to do two and three column layouts along with simple methods to deal with IE6. This chapter along with the download files is one of the most complete collection on layouts that I've ever seen. For me it alone was worth the price of the book.

I've worked through all the exercises in this book along with doing some experiments based on them. There are some errors in the book that may cause problems for those new to CSS.

1. There are several places where a small o is used in the hexadecimal color codes. Those familiar with them will know that the highest letter that can be used is F. In all instances where you see a small o it should be replaced with a zero. The code downloads seem to be correct.

2. On page 143 there is a typo regarding the math used for a blockquote element. It says that 38% of 720 pixels is 723.6 which should be rounded up to 725px. It should read that it equals 273.6 which should be rounded up to 275px. Once you have that straight the rest of the exercise makes sense.

3. The text in the example on Figure 10-14 on page 388 is wrong for the first div. It should read that it is 75px from the right side of the page. The code in the download files is correct though in regards to where the div is placed even though the text describing placement is wrong.

I want to make one other note. While you will learn a lot from creating the horizontal menu in the Journey project the code will not be practical for menus created by content management systems like WordPress or Drupal. If you have complete control over the text in the nav menus then it will work just fine (although I would use different styling). So... static pages fine but you will have to study other methods of coding menus if you are creating themes for CMS's (which is another whole subject in itself).

So despite a few errors I'm going to give this book five stars. It contains a wealth of practical information along with a really complete and well organized set of download files. David's explanations are very thorough and he structures exercises that will help you truly understand the material. Working through them answered some of the final nagging questions that had been bugging me in implementing CSS layouts. It's one of the best books I've gone through on CSS.

I had been trying to get myself started with CSS, and had browsed over dozen of books. Finally, I got this book and I was ready to get started. The book takes off very beautifully building over the same file.

The whole book is written keeping an focus on hand-on-training and there is code associated with each exercise to test and experiment.

For someone looking to get started with CSS, this is a perfect match.

This a great book. The price was one-third of what Barnes & Noble was selling it for and I received it really quickly.

I am a newbie to CSS and this book brought it all into focus for me. I used some of the css techniques immediately on my web page and am satisfied that this book is a great starting place for anyone that wants to learn about utilizing Cascading Style Sheets on their web creations.

Book starts from the beginning (assuniming no prior knowledge) and moves systematicly through the material in a clear appraoch to the material. Provides a solid foundation in CSS.

A great book especially for a beginner as I'm.., David Powers one more time take time to explaining step by step how to create a web page showing the best in the market... thanks David