The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks

by Rachel Andrew

Book Overview

Note: A new edition of this book has been released. Please look for "The CSS Anthology, 2nd Edition" (ISBN: 097584198X)

A practical guide on CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for professionals and novices, that can be used both as a tutorial and read cover-to-cover or as a handy and practical reference book to common problems, solutions and effects.

The Question and Answer format makes it easy for readers to solve their problems and learn...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0957921888
• ISBN13: 9780957921887
• Release Date: November 2004
• Publisher: Sitepoint
• Length: 391 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 7.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

No more frustration

This is a great book on CSS. I bought it on the strength of the reviews here, and I was not at all disappointed. I am a developer by trade, and while I've had some experience with web design through various past projects, I've done very little with CSS. Laying web pages out in tables was what I knew, and so that's how I did it. Occasionally, I would use CSS to pull some of the markup out of the HTML so I didn't have to reuse it, but I never really leveraged (or understood) the power of CSS. This book changed a lot of that. Within days of receiving this book, I started a couple new web projects. The first was a new website, and I got the opportunity to put a lot of the fantastic recipes to work, modifying them to suit my needs. The second web project involved taking a pre-existing web module (built with heavy CSS usage) and using it as a template for a new web system. The two systems were very different (the first was a news/content site and the system being built was a web application), so there were a lot of modifications that needed to be made, while keeping the general look and feel of the original site. If this book was just recipes, I would have had a hard time with the second task. But because book goes into explanations of why the recipies work, breaking each recipe out into a series of steps with exposition of each, I was able to reuse concepts rather than just recipes. As I mentioned before, I had a little CSS experience before reading this book. I was familiar with HTML, but I have never been a designer, and it has been a few years since I've really built a website. I feel this book got me back up to speed quickly, and I would recommend this book to anyone wanting to familiarize themselves with CSS.

Fills the how-do-I-do-that niche very well

I don't write alot of reviews, but I need to comment on this book. There are plenty of CSS books available, but I really appreciate this one. Here's why: This book "breaks down the wall" that you will eventually hit while coding something up and need an answer fast. You know the feeling, you're in the zone, and you really don't want to stop for a half-hour google search and work with someone's wacky code. No need to do that with this book by your side. Pop open to the TOC and you'll likely find exactly what you need. My example from this past weekend: I wanted to find some quick code to allow me to highlight form fields as the user is in them, open the book and the author gives you the CSS. She quickly points out that the CSS only works in Firefox (currently), so she gives us the Javascript, too! As someone who is (much) more of a programmer than a designer, I highly recommend this book. It has saved me several times in the past few days, well worth the cost.

excellent reference manual

The book is an excellent reference manual that you will find yourself referring back to time and again. Got a CSS problem? Scan the table of contents for a match, and I'll bet you'll find your answer. I have been writing web applications since the mid nineties, so I am very familiar with HTML. Until recently, I have been using CSS mostly for text formatting. Positioning and layout has been left to tables. We are starting a new project so I started looking into CSS more closely so we could create XHTML 1.1 compliant pages. I started with a few CSS reference books, but they didn't help. Then I tried CSS Zen Garden. While the book contains interesting web design information, it does really help someone looking for how-to information. The CSS Anthology was my third try and it was just what I was looking for. Rachel's book is also a very easy read with a lot of screen captures. I was able to finish the book in a few hours, and I tend not to be a fast reader.

Fine Intro to CSS Solutions

My guess is that there are many hundreds, if not thousands, of web designers who continue to build sites and web applications using "old-fashioned" tables and HTML layout formatting instead of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). I'm one of them. The problem is that the modern trend is away from HTML table and layout formatting and towards newer standards-compliant means. The protocols and standards of the World Wide Web are evolving towards "cleaner" code, more standardized code, and more capable code, generally guided by principles and standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium, known as W3C. In the book, "The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks, and Hacks", author Rachel Andrew provides an easy way for hold-outs to ease into CSS design. This is not a treatise or concept-minded book, but a practical introduction and guide to putting CSS to immediate use in real-world contexts that every web designer is already familiar with. The author shows how to use CSS to style text, format headings and images, create navigation, style forms and user interfaces, and work with browser-compatibility issues. Andrew is a working web designer and applications designer and presents the material in a very straightforward practical manner - almost as if the reader was following along at a workshop. The writing is clear, all examples are illustrated with relevant code samples, and she offers the insights of an experienced professional regarding everyday problems and solutions. The book is composed of a preface, nine chapters, and an index. Chapter 1 is an introduction to CSS showing why it is replacing HTML table and layout formatting, and the basic concepts of CSS. The other chapters are set up in a "problem/solution" format where various design issues - text styling, image layout, etc. - are presented and solved by adept usage of CSS. Even readers who have never paid much attention to CSS will quickly get a useful, working sense of how it is used and how to use it immediately themselves. Although CSS is yet another language to learn, Andrew presents it in such a way that it seems like it is an easy learn. And it demonstrably is, as here, easy to use. The best parts of the book are the designer tips from an experienced code-writer on how to work with code across different browsers and platforms, and how to understand that browsers have two modes of parsing - a compliant mode and a "quirks" mode. Some browsers, she shows, just have "quirks", especially Microsoft's Internet Explorer. (Surprise!). Although all the CSS tags necessary to illustrate the solutions presented here are shown, a list or chart of most commonly used CSS tags would have been helpful here. Downloadable code for all of the book's examples are available at the publisher's website - www.sitepoint.com/books/cssant1. This is a very nice book to transition to CSS and current web standards-compliant code.

Recipe oriented approach to CSS

This book takes a cookbook approach to organizing CSS best practice information. It has 101 problems that it presents which it then fixes with tips and tricks designed to work in a cross platform setting. There are a lot of CSS books on the market. This book stands out in the field because of it's real world examples and practical advice. So many books have esoteric examples of pages you would never find in the wild. This book has elegant examples that show you not only what you can do, but also guide you towards what you should do. Well written with lots of example code and screenshots. You will need to know CSS before you pick this book up.