Core CSS (2nd Edition) (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Useful for both Web designers and developers, Core CSS: Cascading Style Sheets provides a definitive guide to style sheets, which provide a new level of flexibility for browser-based content. With a comprehensive reference to all CSS1 and CSS2 features and an excellent survey of which features work in eight of today's browsers, this book shows off the strengths of style sheets for the next generation of Web content.

Particularly for developers, CSS allows more precise control of elements inside browsers, making it a lot easier to create Web clients that compete with traditional stand-alone applications. But support for CSS in today's browsers is spotty. The strength of this book is that it explains both the CSS1 and CSS2 standards, even though they are still under development. This text shows off what each property is supposed to accomplish with sample HTML and screenshots. The author is careful to note problems with CSS properties in today's browsers. For the CSS1 standard, every property is marked as being unsafe, safe, or partially implemented on no less than eight browsers (including Netscape 3 and 4.x, Internet Explorer 3 through 5, and Opera for Windows, UNIX, and Mac platforms).

The second part of the book is devoted to the CSS2 standard with a description of proposed support for Unicode, for formatting Web pages (with paged media properties), and for tagging content so that it can be read out loud by computer-generated voices. Although still under construction, the CSS1 and CSS2 standards will certainly offer a better Internet for us all. In the meantime, Core CSS: Cascading Style Sheets describes what's available in today's browsers. It's a solid reference that will make CSS understandable to anyone, regardless of their level of Web expertise. --Richard Dragan

Topics covered: Introduction to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), the CSS1 and CSS2 standards, the browser wars, CSS support on the Netscape, Internet Explorer, Opera and Mozilla browsers; basic CSS (grouping, inheritance, and contextual selectors), cascading order, CSS units, pseudo-classes and pseudo-elements, font properties, color and background properties, text and box properties, classification properties, new CSS2 features, Unicode support, generated content and automatic numbering for lists, properties for printing Web pages, new table properties, aural style sheets for speech-enabled browsers, CSS1 and CSS2 reference and cross-browser comparison of supported properties. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Description

Core CSS, 2nd Edition is a comprehensive guide that shows both beginning and expert Web developers all they need to know to achieve great results with the latest style sheet properties. In this example-rich book, Schengili-Roberts provides in-depth coverage of the CSS1 and CSS2 standards, provides a "heads up" look at what to expect in the new CSS3 specification, and covers those CSS3 properties specific to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. It is the most complete and up-to-date CSS reference available.

CSS is fundamental to current Web design, allowing you to separate content from formatting, and to do Web page layout in ways simply not possible using regular HTML. Most books on CSS simply look at how you can accomplish certain formatting tricks, but this book delves deeper, looking at how each CSS property works, what CSS is capable of, and what to expect in the near future.

This book provides the most accessible and up-to-date listing available on CSS compatibility across browsers and operating systems so Webmasters can finally know which CSS properties are "safe" to use.

Detailed appendices provide full CSS property listings, compatibility charts, and more.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 864 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR; 2 edition (October 3, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0130092789
• ISBN-13: 978-0130092786
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,169,360 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book -- Plenty of Info About How to Use CSS Now, July 6, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Core CSS Cascading Style Sheets (With CD-ROM) (Paperback)

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!

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Adequate reference volume - probably not a starting point, January 11, 2004

By	richardpinneau.com (Colorado) - See all my reviews

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.

23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Part good, Mostly Bad, January 3, 2001

By	"silent_catalyst" (Overland Park, KS USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Core CSS Cascading Style Sheets (With CD-ROM) (Paperback)

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.