By Dave Shea and Molly E. Holzschlag
Review by: Alex
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CSS is one of the most important elements of the internet, it allows the seperation of style and content and enables Website Designers to not only allow those who browse using individual browsers but those wishing to use portable devices, printers and additional methods to view your content. This allows you to cater for everyone of your customers (or visitors) needs.
The key of this book (The CSS Zen Garden - which is made by the authors of the popular website) shows that websites which make the most out of CSS and W3C standards can be just as beautiful as those which use flawed design methods eliminating the need to use bad unstandardised code. The CSS Zen Garden website is considered by many website designers as a key example of the beauty of the internet and this book is nothing short of an exceptional window into the evidence of this. Many site designers consider this book the "bible" of design, its content is well structured and gives simple step by step (and in-depth) analysis of several of the website designs which have been created for the site and show you what is under the hood and how these fantastic effects were achieved.
The chapters of the books work through every element which must be taken into consideration when designing and developing websites, from the initial tags to use in html to meet W3C standards to typography and colour and how they can be used effectivly to make your design flow flawlessly when designing. It can be seen from the layout of the book that it is a friendly guide to designing sites and rather then acting as complex development lesson which would hammer into loads of unnessesiary details, the CSS Zen Garden book gives simple reasoning and logic behind each action and explains everything in a clear manner which even the earliest beginner to CSS should be able to understand. This book takes important points and makes them more like tips of the day then detailed history lessons and giving "code in action" examples you start to understand how powerful the language of CSS can really be.
This book is suitable for the following types of people interested in website design:
- Website designers who wish to achieve beauty with low maintainence coding
- Website developers who understand the importance of standards
- People who are new to website design and want somewhere to start from