The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks (Paperback)

by Rachel Andrew (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks is a compilation of best practice solutions to the most challenging CSS problems. The second edition of this best-selling book, now in full color, has been completely revised and updated to cover the latest techniques and newer browsers, including Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7.

It's the most complete question-and-answer book on CSS, with over 100 tutorials that'll show you how to gain more control over the appearance of your web page, create sophisticated Web page navigation controls, design for today's alternative browsing devices including phones and screen readers, and much more.

The CSS code used to create each of the components is available for download and guaranteed to be simple, efficient and cross-browser compatible.

This book will show you how to:

Construct robust CSS layouts that work every time.

Create sleek drop-down menus using only CSS.

Build a professional tabbed navigation system.

Replace image-based navigation with low-fat CSS lists.

Design smarter, more usable CSS-flavored web forms.

Use rounded corners minus the bloated HTML.

Allow your visitors to select their preferred look and feel.

Let the W3C validator do your debugging.

Reduce the burden of site maintenance and updates.

... along with 92 other solutions to common questions and problems.

The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks is ideal for Web designers who would like to add sparkle to their existing designs, as well as newcomers who want to become true CSS masters.

The book can be read cover to cover, or referred to like a cookbook with 101 different recipies for your Website. It's written in an easy-to-follow, consistent format that's well illustrated with plenty of full color screenshots and code examples, providing quick visual cues.

What the Reviewers say:

"This is likely the best book we've seen for extending the power of cascading style sheets... The book is an outstanding example of how a code-based, technical manual should be designed and presented... Anyone who uses CSS can benefit from this impressive volume." - The Kleper Report

"If you are looking for a practical, hands-on question-and-answer book The CSS Antghology is highly recommended. It is well designed in every respect: visually pleasing, content is well organised, and it is very well written." - PC Update

"Rachel Andrew has done people like me a huge favor by writing this revision... This is another book that I will not only use to expand my personal web development skills, but will be one that I expect I will refer to frequently as I venture further into more complex web page creation." - TCM Reviews

About the Author
Rachel Andrew is the Director of edgeofmyseat.com, a Web solutions company based in the UK. She is a member of the Web Standards project, serving on the Dreamweaver Task Force.

Rachel's writing credits include: Dreamweaver MX Design Projects (Apress), Fundamental Web Design and Development Skills (glasshaus) and HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS, 2nd Edition (SitePoint).

Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: SitePoint; 2 edition (August 14, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 097584198X
• ISBN-13: 978-0975841983
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 7 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (54 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #287,283 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

81 of 82 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fine Intro to CSS Solutions, January 26, 2005

By	John A. Suda (Rochester NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks, and Hacks (Paperback)

My guess is that there are many hundreds, if not thousands, of web designers who continue to build sites and web applications using "old-fashioned" tables and HTML layout formatting instead of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). I'm one of them. The problem is that the modern trend is away from HTML table and layout formatting and towards newer standards-compliant means. The protocols and standards of the World Wide Web are evolving towards "cleaner" code, more standardized code, and more capable code, generally guided by principles and standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium, known as W3C.

In the book, "The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks, and Hacks", author Rachel Andrew provides an easy way for hold-outs to ease into CSS design. This is not a treatise or concept-minded book, but a practical introduction and guide to putting CSS to immediate use in real-world contexts that every web designer is already familiar with. The author shows how to use CSS to style text, format headings and images, create navigation, style forms and user interfaces, and work with browser-compatibility issues.

Andrew is a working web designer and applications designer and presents the material in a very straightforward practical manner - almost as if the reader was following along at a workshop. The writing is clear, all examples are illustrated with relevant code samples, and she offers the insights of an experienced professional regarding everyday problems and solutions.

The book is composed of a preface, nine chapters, and an index. Chapter 1 is an introduction to CSS showing why it is replacing HTML table and layout formatting, and the basic concepts of CSS. The other chapters are set up in a "problem/solution" format where various design issues - text styling, image layout, etc. - are presented and solved by adept usage of CSS.

Even readers who have never paid much attention to CSS will quickly get a useful, working sense of how it is used and how to use it immediately themselves. Although CSS is yet another language to learn, Andrew presents it in such a way that it seems like it is an easy learn. And it demonstrably is, as here, easy to use.

The best parts of the book are the designer tips from an experienced code-writer on how to work with code across different browsers and platforms, and how to understand that browsers have two modes of parsing - a compliant mode and a "quirks" mode. Some browsers, she shows, just have "quirks", especially Microsoft's Internet Explorer. (Surprise!). Although all the CSS tags necessary to illustrate the solutions presented here are shown, a list or chart of most commonly used CSS tags would have been helpful here. Downloadable code for all of the book's examples are available at the publisher's website - www.sitepoint.com/books/cssant1.

This is a very nice book to transition to CSS and current web standards-compliant code.

59 of 62 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Recipe oriented approach to CSS, December 28, 2004

By	Jack D. Herrington "engineer and author" (Silicon Valley, CA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks, and Hacks (Paperback)

This book takes a cookbook approach to organizing CSS best practice information. It has 101 problems that it presents which it then fixes with tips and tricks designed to work in a cross platform setting.

There are a lot of CSS books on the market. This book stands out in the field because of it's real world examples and practical advice. So many books have esoteric examples of pages you would never find in the wild. This book has elegant examples that show you not only what you can do, but also guide you towards what you should do.

Well written with lots of example code and screenshots. You will need to know CSS before you pick this book up.

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars No more frustration, August 29, 2005

By	Todd D. Farmer (United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks, and Hacks (Paperback)

This is a great book on CSS. I bought it on the strength of the reviews here, and I was not at all disappointed.

I am a developer by trade, and while I've had some experience with web design through various past projects, I've done very little with CSS. Laying web pages out in tables was what I knew, and so that's how I did it. Occasionally, I would use CSS to pull some of the markup out of the HTML so I didn't have to reuse it, but I never really leveraged (or understood) the power of CSS. This book changed a lot of that.

Within days of receiving this book, I started a couple new web projects. The first was a new website, and I got the opportunity to put a lot of the fantastic recipes to work, modifying them to suit my needs. The second web project involved taking a pre-existing web module (built with heavy CSS usage) and using it as a template for a new web system. The two systems were very different (the first was a news/content site and the system being built was a web application), so there were a lot of modifications that needed to be made, while keeping the general look and feel of the original site.

If this book was just recipes, I would have had a hard time with the second task. But because book goes into explanations of why the recipies work, breaking each recipe out into a series of steps with exposition of each, I was able to reuse concepts rather than just recipes.

As I mentioned before, I had a little CSS experience before reading this book. I was familiar with HTML, but I have never been a designer, and it has been a few years since I've really built a website. I feel this book got me back up to speed quickly, and I would recommend this book to anyone wanting to familiarize themselves with CSS.