| OverviewSimply put, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a way to
separate a document's structure from its presentation. The
benefits of this can be quite profound: CSS allows a much
richer document appearance than HTML and also saves time --
you can create or change the appearance of an entire
document in just one place; and its compact file size makes
web pages load quickly.
CSS: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition,
provides you with a comprehensive guide to CSS
implementation, along with a thorough review of all aspects
of CSS 2.1. Updated to cover Internet Explorer 7,
Microsoft's vastly improved browser, this new edition
includes content on positioning, lists and generated
content, table layout, user interface, paged media, and
more. Author Eric Meyer tackles the subject with passion,
exploring in detail each individual CSS property and how it
interacts with other properties. You'll not only learn how
to avoid common mistakes in interpretation, you also will
benefit from the depth and breadth of his experience and his
clear and honest style. This is the complete sourcebook on
CSS.
Editorial Reviews| Book Description | | Simply put, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a way to separate a document's structure from its presentation. The benefits of this can be quite profound: CSS allows a much richer document appearance than HTML and also saves time -- you can create or change the appearance of an entire document in just one place; and its compact file size makes web pages load quickly. CSS: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition, provides you with a comprehensive guide to CSS implementation, along with a thorough review of all aspects of CSS 2.1. Updated to cover Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft's vastly improved browser, this new edition includes content on positioning, lists and generated content, table layout, user interface, paged media, and more. Author Eric Meyer tackles the subject with passion, exploring in detail each individual CSS property and how it interacts with other properties. You'll not only learn how to avoid common mistakes in interpretation, you also will benefit from the depth and breadth of his experience and his clear and honest style. This is the complete sourcebook on CSS. |
|
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Reader Reviews From Amazon (Ranked by 'Helpfulness') | Average Customer Rating: |  | based on 17 reviews. |
| Good reference, 2007-10-04 | | Reviewer rating: |  |
| | This book could be organized a little more intuitively, but all-in-all it has the stipulations and definitions you need from the CSS standards in a printed form. I would recommend the pocket guide as well. |
| | Excellent as a Second Volume and Definitive Reference, 2007-09-03 | | Reviewer rating: |  |
| I've managed development efforts for several years and, although I'm an advanced developer in ASP.Net and numerous server-side technologies, felt I was too much at the mercy of "the web guys" on my project teams when it came to making decisions on content design. So, a couple years ago I purchased Richard York's "Beginning CSS" (Wrox Press) and found it to be an excellent primer on CSS. Having designed my own style-sheets for the couple years since, I realized I still had some questions as to the finer points of CSS design techniques.
I purchased Eric Meyer's "CSS: The Definitive Guide" and consider it an excellent second volume on the subject. If you are brand new to the topic of CSS, I'd recommend one of this author's other more introductory titles before attempting to read this title. Both Meyer's and York's more introductory texts focus more on building block examples and levels of support offered by the various browsers. "CSS: The Definitive Guide" assumes this foundation is in place and, instead, focuses on the more advanced and, as the title says, definitive discussions of topics Meyer has found to represent points of confusion among content developers.
I have had great luck with numerous volumes in O'Reilly's line of "Topic: The Definitive Guide", and this book continues this string of good luck. While it is not the ideal introductory text on CSS, for reasons cited above, it represents a great second volume - or even first volume for the content developer who already understands the basic principles and does not need building block examples. Numerous sections, especially the very succinct discussions of the CSS Box Model, are by themselves worth the price of the book.
--Doug Hettinger
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| | Definitive? Yeah, I'd agree with that., 2007-08-08 | | Reviewer rating: | |
| In a way I'm glad this book contains everything you need to know about CSS.
But in a way I'm sad that everything you need to know about CSS seems to be growing at a phenomenal rate - along with just about everything else tech-related.
Sigh. Job security, I guess.
Anyway, this book, coupled with O'Reilly's "CSS Cookbook", should enable you to do anything you want to your website.
Color would've been nice (ditto for the "CSS Cookbook") but probably would have jacked the price up too high.
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| | slightly better than ok, 2007-07-03 | | Reviewer rating: |  |
| | I purchased this book with the expectation of being able to implement CSS for a website. The book felt very much textbook-ish, focusing too much on the theory and not enough on practical implementation. I had hoped for more best practices and more on layouts. This book is a great CSS reference but if you're looking for one-stop-shopping for building a CSS web site, you might be better off with something else. |
| | excellent tutorial, not so much a definitive guide, 2007-06-27 | | Reviewer rating: | |
| This is an excellent tutorial, and the discussion of the box model in Chapter 7 is alone worth the price of the book. If you think you understand CSS, but you don't understand the box model fully, then you don't really understand CSS. And Eric Meyer does a very good job of walking you slowly through that model. The chapters after chapter 7 fill in that model more completely with additional details that are also indispensable.
However, I think this book should have been called "CSS: A Complete Tutorial," rather than "CSS: The Definitive Guide." This is not laid out in a way that would make it ideal as a reference book.
Overall, this is a sort of book where you won't get an answer to your question without rereading a couple of pages first. Second, the index is quite poor. Basic concepts covered throughout the book don't make their way into the index. Third, while the appendix of CSS properties is useful, a glaring omission is the lack of a browser compatibility chart. Certainly creating such a chart would be difficult, but still necessary (I think) for calling something "The Definitive Guide." Browser compatibility is certainly subject to improve over time, but a baseline list of compatibility at the time of publication would be highly useful, considering that such resources on the web are virtually not to be found. After all, O'Reilly's "Javascript: The Definitive Guide" at least manages to list the standard that defines each portion of the language, whereas the appendix in this book doesn't even do that.
That said, this book has revolutionized my own understanding of CSS, since I read it like a tutorial, and it seems I was badly in need of a tutorial. Consequently, for those who don't understand the true mechanics of CSS, I highly recommend buying and reading this book cover to cover. For those who are well-versed in the underlying mechanics and simply want a reference to the nitty-gritty details, however, this is probably not your answer. |
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