Stylin' with CSS: A Designer's Guide

by Charles Wyke-Smith

Book Overview

Cascading Style Sheets enable you to rapidly create web designs that can be shared by hundreds or even thousands of web pages. It accelerates development cycles by centralizing text and layout... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0321525566
• ISBN13: 9780321525567
• Release Date: January 2007
• Publisher: New Riders Publishing
• Length: 298 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 7.6" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Very Helpful and easy

Stylin' has easy to understand examples, and gets straight to the point. If anyone wants to learn CSS, in an easy and none confusing way, I really recommend this book. Unlike other books I read on the subject, books that tend to overwhelm the reader with un-necessities, Stylin' gets to the heart of what's important and provides examples of how to do the design. I originally pursued this book because I wanted to learn how to design web pages without using tables, and this book has helped me tremendously. It's a starter book, not an advanced. But after reading, you'll be designing web pages properly using cascading style sheets for presentation, and XHTML for content.

Excellent book to start with CSS

I had already some HTLM background, at least enough to build some basic personal sites, but almost no CSS knowledge. I wanted to get rid of using tables in my layouts, get a more consistent look throughout the different browsers and also benefit from the separation of content and markup. CSS does all those things for you. I found this book a solid introduction to CSS. In fact, it is probably only an introduction for professionals, because for those that want to create small to medium sized web-sites, I believe the material contained in the book is all you need, not only an introduction. I like very much the author writing style; The book contains a lot of images that really helps you understand what he is trying to explain; There is a lot of references to web-sites where you can find more information for a specific topic; He explains why to use this or that and why some features do not work with Internet Explorer and how to fix it; There is a web-site for the book where you can download all the examples and templates he uses in the book. I recommend this book for everyone starting with CSS. As by the time I am writing this review we can not see inside the book, I am adding some insight of the contents of each chapter. The first chapter, Giving Structure to Content, gives you a quick overview of XHTML and explains why do you need CSS and what it can do for you. Even though it's a good idea to have some previous knowledge of HTML/XHTML, the first chapter does a good job on giving you the basis that is explored in the next chapters, so one can understand the book without even having much knowledge of HTML/XHTML. The second chapter, How CSS Works, explains how to use CSS in your XHTML pages (inline, embeded and linked styles), how to target tags within your document hierarchy (contextual selectors, class, ids, universal selector, attribute selectors, pseudo-classes, etc.), among other things like inheritance and the cascade rules. The third chapter, Stylin' Fonts and Text, talks about all the font and text properties, like sizing, font-style, text-indent, letter spacing, etc. There is a lot of good information about why and when to use certain styles and fonts. The fourth chapter, Positioning Elements, explains the box model and the static, relative, absolute and fixed positionning options. It also shows how to use floated elements and the clear property, that can be used to create column layouts. The fifth chapter, Basic Page Layout, shows how to use all the knowledge of the previous chapters to build two and three column layouts using absolute positioning and the float/clear methods. The sixth chapter, Advanced Page Layout, starts talking about backgrounds and expand to advanced layouts with fluid center layouts and negative margins layout. The seventh chapter, Creating Interface Components, shows how to use lists to build navigation bars and CSS based drop-down menus. It also talks about how to control the formatting of forms, radio

The Best Learning Resource on CSS

If you are a beginner or an intermediate user who wants to learn CSS from the ground up this is simply the best source out there. I got this book two days ago and I did not stop reading it since. It is very well written - detailed, funny, interesting and it does not treat you like a CSS dummy, but like someone who has to learn this skills to apply it in practice. Its use of visuals, step-by-step examples and supporting tips is excellent. If you are looking to learn CSS styling, specially for business applications - buy this book. I also liked "Eric Myer on CSS" book, but that one was more design oriented, and less pedagogical.

Excellent and Practical Book!

Reviewed by Jim Lauria HuNTUG member "Stylin' is also a very practical book, from which it is very easy to take ideas and code for your own work." Right from the introduction to the CSS Properties and Values appendix this book is a winner. Charles Wyke-Smith does an excellent job of getting into the meat of CSS from theory and W3C rules of syntax to step-by-step how to's for creating layouts, including tricks and shortcuts. The writing style is informal and informative by an author who obviously knows his stuff. For example: A simple two-column layout-Smith describes "the document should be styled to look like this ..." etc. providing all the necessary code and finishes the example with "It looks like this in the browser" with a screenshot Smith covers CSS rules, drop-down menus, text formatting, 2 and 3 column layouts, advanced page layout, element positioning and background image element additions to text and links. The appendix lists all CSS properties and values in a table from W3 Schools. He is also not shy about scolding Microsoft about it's adherance to a non-standards past-he tells the reader when a CSS feature may have some trouble with MS, It Doesn't Work in Microsoft Internet Explorer aka "IDWIMIE". He does however mention workarounds or hacks. The book level is marked beginning/intermediate and it is so. It is an excellent text for beginners and has plenty of good stuff for those who have some web design/Cascading Style Sheet experience as well. A good reference. I rate this title 5 stars.