Customer Reviews

Robin Nixon's CSS & CSS3 Crash Course

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This is a good book to get started with CSS, including CSS3. It's good for beginners or for those who already know some CSS but want to learn more, especially some new CSS3 properties. However, if you are an 'advanced' user wanting greater depth & detail, then you'll probably want something 'beefier', but the price is right for what you get.

The course is divided into 16 lectures, with later lectures concentrating on the new CSS3 properties. The later lectures discuss the new CSS3 attribute selectors, backgrounds, borders, box-shadows, colors, gradients, opacity, text effects & web fonts, and transformations (2D and 3D). However, some CSS3 things are not included - like speech, generated content, and navigation. Part of the reason that some things were left out is because they are in a greater level of flux and have less browser support.

I found the later chapters more interesting, especially the ones on 2D and 3D transitions, mostly because I was unfamiliar with those new CSS3 capabilities.

There are some examples which I thought were very useful, and you can download example files from the web.

Also talked about are the proprietary properties that are needed for support in more browsers (those beginning with -moz-, -webkit-, -o-, etc.). Unfortunately you'll probably find that Internet Explorer is the browser that seems to have the least support for a lot of new CSS3 stuff, but the book includes some ways to simulate some CSS3 effects. Hopefully IE 10 will change a lot of that.

NOTE: This review is based on an updated book that corrects some errors and misprints that were in previous versions.

I found this book very disappointing. It is clearly a printout of an online course, in black and white at that. It doesn't stand alone. You must have access to the webpages he references for the book to be useful. There are many places where, instead of describing features, he gives you examples which you can only see by displaying the source of a web page (for which he kindly provides a picture!). The section on colors and opacity starts with a display of "the color wheel displaying both hue and saturation" in black and white! The rest of the chapter is similarly full of gradients and various interesting color effects, illustrated in black and white. The author clearly knows his stuff, but print, especially without color, isn't an appropriate medium for this content.