The Bottom Line
This book is excellent for designers who want to improve their CSS skills. It goes through the basics of CSS to advanced topics with fluidity and ease. Highly recommended.
Pros
- Full-color makes it easy to read
- Excellent coverage of CSS1 and CSS2
- Shows how CSS is used in live Web environments
Cons
- A few typos
Description
- Chapter one covers structured markup, including XHTML and how to write to the standards.
- Chapter two explains the basics of CSS, how cascading style sheets work and their basic grammar.
- Chapter three starts in on writing CSS, including the basics of style rules and validation.
- Chapter four moves into design with a full coverage of typography and fonts.
- Chapter five works with colors, backgrounds, and borders in your style sheets.
- Chapter six introduces CSS positioning and layouts.
- Chapter seven is one of the best chapters. Learn to convert a table site to CSS, step-by-step.
- Chapter eight showcases several sites and how they use CSS to create their designs.
- Chapter nine goes more in-depth into Wired News - explaining how the site is constructed.
Guide Review - Cascading Style Sheets The Designers Edge by Molly Holzschlag
I really like this book. Within a week of getting it, I'd read it cover-to-cover, and learned many new things about Cascading Style Sheets. While I don't see this as a beginner's book on CSS, for most intermediate and advanced designers, it will be wonderful. Doing the work to convert your own table-based site along with the demo will teach you more about CSS than anything else could. And the introductory portions of the book are easy to follow and understand, taking you through complicated parts of CSS without a lot of hand-waving. Every Web designer should have a copy of this book to help them create standards-compliant, beautiful designs. This book takes something possibly difficult and makes it very easy.
