Stylin' With Css: A Designer's Guide 1st Edition

by Charles Wyke-Smith (Author)

71 ratings

ISBN-13: 978-0321305251

ISBN-10: 0321305256

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Stylin' with CSS: A Designer's Guide (Voices That Matter)
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After introducing readers to CSS, a practical handbook explains how to style text, create style sheets, position content, create links, design navigation, and style forms, lists, and tables, to enable any level designer to start quickly creating sites with CSS. Original. (All users)

About the Author

Charles Wyke-Smith who has been creating Web sites since 1994, and is currently Director of Production at Nacio, a corporate hosting and development company in Novato, California, that focuses on user experience, information architecture, and interface design. He has worked as a Web design consultant for such companies as Wells Fargo, ESPN Videogames, and The University of San Francisco.Wyke-Smith has also taught multimedia and interface design and spoken at many industry conferences.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ New Riders Pub; 1st edition (April 22, 2005)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 275 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0321305256
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0321305251
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.27 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.5 x 0.5 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #6,003,328 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #294 in CSS Programming
- #878 in Word Processing Books
- #8,294 in Web Design (Books)

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71 ratings

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Charles Wyke-Smith

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Charles Wyke-Smith has been involved in media production for his entire career. In the mid-80s, he co-founded PRINTZ Electronic Design, an early, all-computerized design studio in San Francisco. He has worked in management and consulting roles at Wells Fargo, ESPN Videogames, and Benefitfocus, where he was Director of User Experience. In 2009, he co-founded PeopleMatter, an HR platform for the services industries. He is currently CEO of a new startup, Bublish, a book discovery platform.

Charles is a performing musician and author of several Web development books, including Stylin’ with CSS, Codin’ for the Web, Scriptin’ with AJAX, and Visual Stylin’ with CSS3. He lives in Charleston, South Carolina with his wife and two daughters.

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3 star		9%
2 star		4%
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John Bonavia

Excellent - the man knows how to EXPLAIN.

Reviewed in the United States on January 26, 2006

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I'm only at page 53 of this book and already I know it is one of the best instructional books I have ever read. Charles has the all-to-rare ability to put himself exactly in the place of the person who doesn't know much about the subject and lead them through it. He is excellent at EXPLAINING things. Doesn't assume that you understand the difference between p.mydef and p#mydef without being told, as others do! (OK, you can backwards-figure it by seeing how mydef is referenced, but it's a detour from the forward path you want to follow.)

Also, he is very thorough. I had already done some work with other books on CSS, but only here - and already in Chapter 2, at that! - did I encounter pseudo-classes and pseudo-elements - very interesting and I can see why he says he will make more use of them later on.

Small niggle: the site for the download of the code is not really prominently given, just mentioned in a paragraph of the Introduction: it's [...] You need the download, because he doesn't reproduce it all in the book - that's probably why the size (and therefore the price) is reasonable for a full-color book. The color of course is immensely helpful. It's pretty silly when some books say "so this will turn word A red and word B green" and show you a black-and-white illustration.

Also, you can experiment with the examples - you can learn a lot that way. (Tip: my favorite editor for that is EditPlus - fast, simple, with nice helpful color-coding but no annoying auto-insert of closing tags, like VS.Net - which is overkill for this kind of exercise anyway, of course).

It's worthwhile to have the major browsers available for testing. I have IE 6, Firefox, and Opera, and that certainly shows up the deficiencies of IE! Now I understand why hard-core Web jockeys are so scornful of IE. It simply fails to implement lots of the CSS standards. My default browser has been Firefox for a while and I'm not going back.

I have lots of programming experience, from mainframe to VB.NET, with plenty of XML, which naturally helps, but never really got into Web UI and applications, beyond basic HTML and some code-based IP communications using objects from System.Web: finally decided a skills upgrade was in order. This book is a great step in the path I'm following from XHTML thru CSS to ASP.NET. Recommended.

7 people found this helpful

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Phil

Very good & very useful.

Reviewed in the United States on February 10, 2006

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Is this book perfect? No. Is it very good? Yes. And if you are a newbe to CSS, it is excellent. I bought Stylin with CSS in order to refresh my memory and clean up my coding. I was looking for an intermediate CSS book. What I got was beginning to intermediate, and better than I expected.

Wyke-Smith has a light and easy writing style with just enough humor to keep things flowing, without letting the humor getting in the way of things. I have previously read Meyer‛s CSS2.0 Programmer‛s Reference and skimmed his Pocket Reference. I‛ve also read Castro‛s CSS chapters in her HTML / XHTML for the WWW & have worked with CSS a little before. These two Meyers books read like dictionaries. Castro is efficient and good. But I got far more out of Wyke-Smith in less time.

Part of what I got from Stylin made me think ‛Wow, that was easier than I thought‛. I picked up some ideas and some neat tricks which he properly credits to the source. There are some IE hacks to help handle the IE Win & Mac problems. All the examples are downloadable in one or more zips from his site. I have made a couple modifications to them for testing and clarifying some points which were important to me. I think Wyke-Smith really puts it together nicely and makes it useful. His book layouts are really helpful. Most pages have hints and comments in the margins next to or pointing at text, code and/or browser output. There are also several source references to web sites which are very helpful. So I feel Stylin is a very good value for the money, and more importantly, very good value for my precious time.

On the negative side, there are certainly some typos and editing errors in this first edition first printing. But there is an errata page on his site, and these kinds of errors seem to be all too common in first edition computer books. On the positive side, if you email him with an error, he will actually read it and write back with a thank-you. What a novel concept. He reports that he & the publisher are now working on cleaning up the errors in preparation for a second printing.

Lastly, I appreciate the fact that there seem to be no paid opinions or what look like personal friends‛ opinions of Stylin. That little bit of honesty is not present in the reviews of many other CSS books. Hint: Look behind each 4 or 5 star opinion before actually reading the opinion. For most computer books on Amazon you will find one or more reviews coming from people who write hundreds or thousands which are all high rated. My rules include distrusting all positive opinions in the first 3 to 6 months of publication, plus all high ratings from people who have only written one or a couple, plus all high ratings from people who never write low ratings. Don‛t be naive like I used to be. Prices are great here, but the Truth Is Not Guaranteed on this site.

2 people found this helpful

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J. Carnie Littlefield

Can't wait to get Wyke-Smith's next book!

Reviewed in the United States on December 6, 2006

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I really like this book and this author. I ordered his next book, Codin' for the Web, about building web sites with form validation, PHP, databases, and SQL, as soon as it was available last month. I hope he writes more books.

Let me say right off the bat that the errata complained about by other reviewers have been fixed in the second printing (still first edition). I am a very thorough proof-reader, and I think I only found one or two mistakes or typos in the whole book while reading it from cover to cover.

This is a book you can sit in an easy chair and read before you get up to go try the code on your computer. You can actually understand it as you read it. He's good at explaining concepts. You can get the overall idea before you start to code. (Not so with Gosselin's JavaScript book that was also a text for the same intermediate web programming course. The "aha" moments came only after slavishly typing in the exact code in the book to see what it would do.) With Stylin' for the Web you get the "aha" moment and then go try it.

You'll need a CSS reference eventually (like Visibone charts), but if you could only have one CSS book, I'd say this is it. (I also tell friends that if you could only have one cookbook, it'd be an older edition of Joy of Cooking. And if only one X/HTML book, it'd be Molly Holzschlag's (although "Head First HTML" may prove worthy competition.) Neil Bradley's XML Companion is in the same category, but it's out of print. I have yet to find a one-and-only JavaScript or PHP book.)

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Top reviews from other countries

Dude

Decent book

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 20, 2019

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Ordered for work. Not bad

Mnemosyne

Might have been a contender.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 27, 2006

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This book is so full of typos and downright careless writing as to be virtually unreadable. Wait until an update appears before considering it. Even so, you would be better off with Dan Cederholm's "Bulletproof Web Design".

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Stylin' With Css: A Designer's Guide 1st Edition

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About the author

Charles Wyke-Smith

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