Cascading Style Sheets for Dummies (Paperback)

by Damon A. Dean (Author), Ryan Clifford (Author), Bethel Simone Kusz (Author) "Buried deep in the bowels of major universities and military installations, scientists and programmers labored to create a network that would allow the simple and..." (more)
Key Phrases: Internet Explorer, Cascading Style Sheets, Times New Roman (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Cascading Style Sheets For Dummies covers the essentials you need to know to incorporate CSS technology into Web projects. This friendly guide covers the enhanced features of the technology that allows you to have total control over the look and feel of your Web projects.

From the Back Cover
The fun and easy wayTM to make your Web pages look great!

Style sheet editors on CD-ROM

Get the scoop on positioning, inheritance, and other CSS tools

Take control of Web page design elements
Cascading Style Sheets let you turn a drab, boring Web page into an eye-catching design masterwork. But how do you get the hang of all those style sheet rules and tags? Relax! With Web design expert Damon Dean at your side, you'll be trying out cool fonts, working with layers, specifying page positions, and more—in no time!

Discover how to:

• Build a style sheet in five minutes
• Work with colors, fonts, and borders
• Position design elements precisely
• Harness inheritance and multiple style sheets
• Tackle tables, XML, and audio

All this on the bonus CD-ROM
Style sheet editors, including:

• Style Master Pro trial version
• TopStyle Pro evaluation version
• Author's sample from book
• System Requirements: PC running Windows 95 or later, Windows NT4 or later; Power Macintosh running System 7.6 or later; See the About the CD appendix for details and complete system requirements.
• Choose from among 33 different subject categories
• Get news you can use on everything from money to health to computers

Damon Dean is the solutions department director at an Internet design firm in San Francisco. He is also the author of FrontPage 2000 For Dummies Quick Reference.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 325 pages
• Publisher: For Dummies (August 15, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0764508717
• ISBN-13: 978-0764508714
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #813,556 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars too many mistakes, November 13, 2002

By	John (Florida) - See all my reviews

Full of errors and mistakes -- not only this, but the author is impossible to follow. Had to buy another book on the topic. Stay away.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not the best I've seen, April 21, 2002

By	Simon Jessey "nutellaconsumer" (Swarthmore, PA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is for people with a reasonable knowledge of HTML 4 who want to learn the basics of Cascading Style Sheets Level 1. Damon Dean wrote "FrontPage 2000 For Dummies: Quick Reference" which was a very useful guide indeed, but this book falls short of that, both in terms of layout and content.

Finding things is hard - as a reference it is pretty hopeless. The tutorials work but they seem to jump around too much. There is a section on how well CSS works with XML, but the author writes his code in CAPITAL letters, which is a no-no in XML. XML and XHTML are case sensitive and must be written in lowercase.

You get a basic grounding in CSS with this book, but I suspect it teaches you some bad habits in the process. For someone who just wishes to add a little bit of style to an otherwise boring website - this will probably suffice.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Who edited this book?, November 25, 2003

By A Customer

The writing in this book is muddy, and like another reviewer here, I had to buy a second book to figure out what this book was saying. Since Dummies books are for beginners, a logical order running from easy to difficult should be used. This author is all over the place.

The above is bad enough, then add to this the obvious fact that the book was merely spell-checked but never looked at by an editor (or at least by one who knows grammar and syntax).

The code isn't consistent, and the index has errors.

Don't buy this book. It was obviously pushed out the publisher's door without any attempt to make sure customers get their money's worth. Don't you get ripped off too.