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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Quick and clean introduction to CSS, August 17, 2002
Cascading Style Sheets or CSS is one of the essential skills needed for web development. The greater degree of control that they give you over the appearance of your pages is well worth any and all effort it takes to learn how to use them. Fortunately, with this book in your hand that effort will be minimal. I have taught CSS several times in a community education setting, but not for over a year. In an attempt to refresh my skills, I examined this book and went through a few of the more detailed examples. They all worked well and I learned several features of CSS that will be used in future classes. I also now recommend this book to students who ask for help in choosing a book to continue their study of CSS. There is one obvious drawback to the book and that is the lack of color. One of the main advantages of using CSS is the excellent control it gives you over the use of colors. While the author makes an honest attempt to fill in the details with text, it simply is not enough to give you the full experience of how the colors will appear. The coverage is thorough and the author also spends a great deal of time explaining the differing support of CSS in the major browsers. This is done via a series of charts called browser report cards and really helps to clarify what will appear, as the support for CSS among the browsers is somewhat arbitrary. In my teaching of CSS, my examples demonstrate many features, not all of which are supported. Students find this confusing and any information about the relative support is very helpful. This is a sound book that will either get you up to speed or refresh your knowledge of CSS in a very short time. Maybe not quite in 24 hours, but close enough so that the difference is not significant.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Indispensible for Good Web Authoring, September 17, 2002
To quickly introduce myself: I have been working with the web very nearly since its inception, including recently teaching a course on design using HTML and CSS. That said, reading this book was of great use to me; I learned things I had never discovered before (some of which, happily, are currently supported by multiple popular browsers), and the guides to browser incompatibility are so useful as to deserve reprinting as a quick cheatsheet to use during the design process. The organization of material is sensible, and while the "hours" aren't really consistent as to how long the material took me to absorb, that should vary by person, so is to be expected. A word about printing errors: there are a few unfortunate ones in the first printing of this book. Each are thoroughly documented in errata on the website the author has provided as a personal courtesy, as well as the various example files and a few more goodies. (The reviewer that decided that he should stop after encountering a printing error and give the book one star, then say "the book may be worth the money" since he hadn't read much of it...well.) In conclusion, the author knows the subject thoroughly and communicated it clearly and entertainingly; his obvious concern for how much the reader gets from his book is commendable and is the basis for what an excellent resource the book is. To borrow a cliche, no web designer should be without this one.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The browser publishers need this book, August 21, 2002
This book is an excellent introduction to Cascading Style Sheets, presented in a style that is approachable and conversational, yet doesn't gloss over the details. The most valuable part of the book, though, is the no-punches-pulled assessment of how CSS elements are, or are not, supported in the real-world browsers, some of which are badly broken. If the publishers of today's web browsers would read this book and fix their implementations, the web would be a better place! Until then, we have to thank Kynn Bartlett for showing us how to do our best to work around the bugs.
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