CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions

This book is helpful. And i needed it for school so it worked out well =]

After giving a reputable online college a chance, I found myself frustrated with their teachings of xHTML in a class called "WWW Fundamentals" which talked about CSS and I didn't learn what I needed to know about writing CSS code for the web. I decided to look through Amazon.com's extensive list of books and came across CSS Mastery, by Andy Budd. This book taught me more in a single week than what my class at the Art Institute taught me in 6 weeks. Through this book I have successfully kicked the habit of "table based design" and now I'm designing web standard based custom web pages using

OK, so I was a little hesitant to pick up this book despite all the great reviews. It was all the errors that were printed in the book that I was unsure of. Most of these errors were typos but some were errors in the code. If you don't know much about CSS these would be hard to spot.

I decided to get the book, which I am still reading, and decided I should hi-light all the errors in the book so I am aware of these issues and can fix them fast with no problem. I found that the books are now being printed with about 80% of these errors fixed. All the typos are gone, and most of the code has been fixed. There are still some odd typos in it, like on page 41 it reads when it should be Some Text. But their mostly small little details. It looks like some of these errata were found after the seconded pressing with the fixes and didn't make it to print. I would still highly suggest this book to anyone wanting a further push into the CSS world. I use CSS everyday but found a lot of information in this book that I had no idea about.

If you do plan to get it I would suggest running through his errata page (http://www.cssmastery.com/CSSMastery-Errata.pdf) and check for the errors. It may take a few minutes to do it, but it will at least stop you from pulling out your hair when working through the book.

I'm a software developer, not a web designer, so I don't use CSS on a daily basis. I've read a number of CSS books. This is the clearest, most practical presentation that I've run into. CSS is a surprisingly complex topic, particularly when you have to consider the real-world incompatibilities. For an intermediate presentation, this is an extremely well written, impressive book.

This was the first CSS book that I purchased. I was always hesitant to purchase a book on CSS because most of the resources that I've found have been mostly beginner's tutorials or instruction and I felt that I had at least a "beyond beginner's" understanding of CSS. I wouldn't go as far as saying I'm an expert at CSS, but at least mid-level to advanced. However, this book had some previous good recommendations from amazon.com so I bit the bullet and bought it. I must say that I was NOT disappointed!

This book starts off with a very quick introduction/recap of CSS basics including good code structure and organization, validation, DOCTYPES, common selectors including IDs and classes, pseudo-classes, and the advanced selectors such as universal, child, attribute and more, and some wonderful reference on the specificity and inheritance, or the "Cascade", the core of CSS. Although this introduction is provided, it is relatively short at about 25 pages and I would suggest a good working understanding of these basics first, as it will help understand the rest of the book easier as opposed to trying to learn CSS for the first time from this book. The following chapter is another quick 15 pages with on "Visual Formatting Model Recap" including the Box Model and Positioning, two EXTREMELY important concepts to understand CSS properly. Although it is short, it is an extremely powerful section.

Chapter 3 finally jumps head first into the code with "Background Images and Image Replacement." With the movement towards "Web 2.0? websites, one of the most common features you'll see in these websites is rounded corners. These can be difficult to achieve successfully and the authors make it very easy. This chapter also touches on different drop shadows and image replacement techniques, which are useful for placing a logo in place but still having the text remain search engine friendly. Chapter 4 is a fairly short chapter on "Styling Links" with some interesting uses of attribute selectors.

Chapter 5 is all about "Stylig Lists and Creating Nav Bars" including the popular "Sliding Doors" popularized by Douglas Bowman of Stopdesign and first published in October of 2003 in A List Apart online magazine. During the section on creating nav bars, this chapter shows how to use CSS sprites for rollovers and visited links, something which I'll be blogging about soon. Chapter 5 also shows how you can use CSS to create image maps, something I've never even thought of doing with CSS.

The next two chapters are two of the best in the book I think. Chapter 6 deals with "Styling Forms and Data Tables", while Chapter 7 tackles "Layout". I think that styling forms properly can be one of the most difficult things to do in a website Chapter 6 shows some good tips and tricks to handle this properly. After all the chapters on styling elements, comes the final code chapter which deals with Layout and shows how to center designs, create two and three column layouts, and liquid, elastic, and hybrid (elastic-liquid), or fluid, layouts.

As any web designer knows, IE doesn't do the best job of displaying HTML and CSS properly according to the W3C. Fortunately, the last two chapters in the book are about "Hacks and Filters" and "Bugs and Bug Fixing", two excellent chapters for dealing with the countless IE CSS bugs. Finally, the last two chapters of the book are Case Studies that put everything together and take you through building two different web sites in a Web Standards way with CSS.

Overall, this is an excellent book, one I'd highly recommend to any web designer, or CSS developer, looking to expand their knowledge of the powerful language that is CSS. Definitely worth adding to your library. On an additional note, this book is published by Friends of Ed, a fantastic publisher of technical books, and one of my favorites. I currently own 8 books published by "Friends of Ed" and 2 more from their parent company Apress, all of which are excellent books.