Cascading Style Sheets: The Designers Edge

by Molly E. Holzschlag

Book Overview

CSS is finally supported by all modern web browsers, empowering Web designers to do what they've been hungering to do for years: control layout more precisely, use color more effectively, and expand typographic options beyond the frustrating limitations of the past. So where to begin? Where can you get design-focused instruction on CSS while learning the technical details? Cascading Style Sheets: The Designer's Edge is precisely the resource you've...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0782141846
• ISBN13: 9780782141849
• Release Date: March 2003
• Publisher: Sybex
• Length: 274 Pages
• Weight: 1.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 8.0" x 10.1"

Customer Reviews

Great Book! Terrible Proofreader!

This is perhaps the best book I've seen on style sheets. It isn't overpowering in an attempt to cover EVERYTHING. The author does an outstanding job of showing just how simple style sheets can be. Many other books leave you with the impression that CSS is just another complex web discipline. For me, something very simply expressed in this book suddenly made me "get it" - The fact that background images and colors can be applied to ANY block-level element. This opens up all kinds of design possibilities. My site's table-based layout was so deeply nested that you had to search long and hard just to find the appropriate table data cell to place a sentence in. With this book, which has an entire chapter devoted to deconstructing a table-based layout and reconstructing it with CSS, I was able to reduce my site's pages down to a fraction of their original size, and now the mark-up for those pages looks more like an easy to read text document than a nightmare of table tags. The site looks exactly as intended in all browsers I've tried and has a pristine and sharp appearance. The changeover was fast and easy, and now, because of CSS, changes are as simple as changing a sentence in a document. My only complaint with this book is that it had a great number of errors in the manuscript: Things like "and" just appearing in the middle of a sentence out of context. It appears that nobody proofread this manuscript. If someone did, he or she needs to go into a different line of work. Proofreaders can't be skimmers. Although this was annoying, and a shame in a large, colorful work, the author's ability to convey the material still came through. Her work was five-star. Sybex's work on getting it ready for print was 2-star at best. Still, it is definitely worth buying and is truly a concise, problem-solving book.

Solid and Worthwhile Introduction to CSS

For someone new to CSS (and whose genes are not coded in hexadecimal), this is exactly the right book. Instead of providing a semi-random survey of a given technology or an exhaustive listing of its syntax (as so many other computer authors do), this author seeks to provide her readers with an understanding of that technology. Using clear and simple examples, she leads her readers through HTML, XHTML, and CSS in a way that provides a beginner with a solid foundation for understanding how best to approach web page design with CSS.With this understanding in place, the reader will then be ready to move on to the "Technical Reference Manuals of CSS" that many of the other reviewers of this book seem to wish they had bought instead.

the best intrdoctuction to CSS

If you are a designer used to WYSIWYG tools but would like to get your feet wet in CSS, then this is absolutely the book for you. Molly does a terrific job introducing all the basic concepts and the examples get you up and running in no time. I couldnt recommend a better book for the CSS novice.

Making the CSS understandable.

When I decide what to review there are times when I choose something to help me out. In the case with this book I am working with a client to teach HTML and CSS and this book fits right into the CSS part of the course. The use of effective CSS is and can be a vital part of web page design, which is why I was pleasantly surprised to find this book. The author breaks down the world of CSS into easy to follow and understandable guide. More than just how to code, this book explains what can happen with the code. The author takes you step by step and not only explains the concept but also gives you a visual tour to enhance the learning process. For my money this book certainly does what I need it to do. I found that learning and understanding CSS has gotten easier by the page. Overall an excellent job!