By Andy Budd, Cameron Moll and Simon Collison
Review by: Alex
Of all of the books on CSS I have reviewed CSS Mastery comes into an entire league of its own. Where CSS Mastery breaks new ground is that it details advanced techniques to CSS rather then being focused for Beginners, on that note you should realise that this book is not something for people just starting out in CSS will want to read as it is something which though anyone can do, only people with a good knowledge of the language of cascading stylesheets will be able to implement in their designs with ease. The book explains details about how to organise your stylesheets more effectively, talks about making your designs using liquid, elastic and hybrid layouts which helps users escape static layout techniques which so many websites follow and impressively explains many CSS bugs in browsers and how they can be fixed (though the book does not go in as much depth as a book specifically on hacks and filters, this book covers some good basic workarounds for common problems). What makes this book worth its weight in gold is that Andy manages to keep the code based examples as simple as possible while explaining what each part of the code accomplishes making this book genuinely simple enough to read and understand. While people new to CSS may want to check out a beginners book or get stuck into something by Eric Meyer, this book takes design to the next step and answers some critical CSS questions which can often make developing in CSS a chore if they stop working as you want them too. The book is laid out well with good step by step points to explain the process, good commentary on the code and has good visual representation of the code in action.
The chapters of this book include the following... Chapter 1 explains how to set the foundations of CSS and how to get the basic design up and running. Chapter 2 details a recap on the visual formatting model. Chapter 3 shows you how to work with background images and how to use image replacement. Chapter 4 works with styling links and how to implement them in your design. Chapter 5 shows you how to create navigation bars and how to style lists. Chapter 6 works with the tricky aspect of styling data tables and forms in XHTML and CSS. Chapter 7 explains how to model your layout in CSS. Chapter 8 gives an entire chapter to hacks and filters for HTML to fix any problems you may have with browser glitches and the final chapter, Chapter 9 gives examples of bugs and how they can be resolved with CSS.
This book is suitable for the following types of people interested in website development:
- Website developers who have a fundamental knowledge of CSS implementation in HTML.
- People who are looking for a way to get advanced CSS tricks to work in all browsers.
- Anyone working in website design who wants to expand their basic CSS knowledge.