The Essential Guide to CSS and HTML Web Design

by Craig Grannell

Book Overview

There may well be a lot of books out there covering CSS and HTML, but this one stands out from the crowd by combining all the best aspects of reference and tutorial books -- it teaches everything you need to know to design great web sites, and moves at a fast pace, eschewing unnecessary theory and obscure details. It is designed so that any level of web designer or developer will find this to be an essential guide. It teaches the basics of CSS...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1590599071
• ISBN13: 9781590599075
• Release Date: November 2007
• Publisher: Apress
• Length: 600 Pages
• Weight: 2.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 7.5" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

web designing with css

Excellent book, after reading and experimenting with css I have been able to convert a site to use css. Did not know anything about css until this book. Gives great insite to web design using css. Worth every penny.

Definately worth purchasing.

The short review: I downloaded this off a torrent; I was so impressed with it, that I'm buying it hard copy. It's definately one of those books that works well for a quick reference. The long review: This book probably isn't for absolute gurus, simply because there's too much explanation. I'd probably recommend "The Ultimate CSS Reference" if you've already got a firm foundation and just need a quick reference that you can flip through faster than you can load a pdf from your flash drive. In fairness, though, this book covers more than CSS; it takes the absolute beginner from the basics to a point where they presumably can google for what they need. I picked this up to get up to date on doing web design, after taking over a decade long haitus from it. I was sold by page 6, where the author explained why he wasn't going to go into using WYSIWYG tools. I was further sold by the _lack_ of an IE centric approach, which I've seen other books use. (One of which went so far as to say that Firefox and Opera weren't worth wasting time designing for, because they comprise such a small percentage of user's browsers.) Craig takes the opposite approach and stresses compatibility heavily. If you're an absolute beginner, I'm not sure this book will be a good fit for you: it tends to present tags only once, and then flesh out actual usage, without covering every possible attribute of them. However, if you're somewhat familiar with doing web sites, and especially if you did it in the bad old days, this book is an absolute godsend. The writing style is pleasing, and the book is organized such that it's easy to read it cover to cover and not get bored. The examples tend to be well illustrated, and the graphics save having to actually load the code to see the end result. Frankly, I was impressed enough with this book to make it the first technical book I've actually _bought_ in years. While it's readable in digital form (which tends to be my preferred method), it almost demands being had in hardcopy. Or, to put it another way, it allowed me to close the 20+ tabs I had open to [...]CSS pages, as well as the multiple Google searches. :-) The only people who might not benefit from this book are the true experts; if you're so familiar with CSS that you can calculate margin offsets in under 2 seconds, for a four column page with 20+ divs, then it's likely you need something like The Ultimate CSS Reference. Even so, the real world site examples at the end might still give you some food for thought. I can't think of any gripe about this book, so, I'll just nitpick: the sheep images used for the img tag demonstrations were too Euro-centric. I'd of much rather preferred llamas.

The tool to go from Transitional to Strict

Craig Grinnell's book is excellent and helpful in any sense. If you want to really dive into CSS and HTML and how to structure a website according to standards this is the book to buy. The book is well organized; the text is smooth and the information valuable. This is a book I am relying on to enhance my ability to structure websites and it is working.

An excellent css/html design guide

The author promises this book is different. I suppose it is, thanks to the author's friendly and comprehensive approach to the material. This is a surprisingly complete guide for beginning and intermediate CSS designers with a lot of useful answers to practical design problems. For instance, many books discuss how to write a form, but this book tells you how to write a mail form, including the fact that the form won't do anything without script support and where to find that support. It's that level of detail that sets this book apart. As one would expect, the author begins with the basics, discussing CSS and its benefits. Then, he talks about typography and working with type before moving on to images. He even includes a brief discussion of color theory. He shows how to display random images using both JavaScript and PHP and provides an exhaustive discussion of links and navigation, including some discussion of accessibility. Of course, he discusses tables and the box model before moving on to forms and page testing. He has a coherent discussion of IE issues and using conditionals to call version-specific style sheets. He moves on to discuss creation of an online storefront and business websites, ending with useful XHTML, entities, and CSS references. The book is over 500 pages with many code examples. I'm sure there are advanced designers who don't need this book; but for the beginner, this book is an excellent place to start. For the intermediate designer, this is a very good reference. I really like Stylin' with CSS: A Designer's Guide (2nd Edition) (Voices That Matter) for the author's presentation of information and the book's attractive physical design; but if I am objective and fair, Craig Grannell's "Essential Guide" is the better book. Grannell supplies more information in greater depth over the entire span of CSS design. So, beginning and intermediate designers who buy this book will not be disappointed. Thanks for reading.

Outstanding CSS design coverage

The CSS and HTML Web Design book builds on the excellent earlier title by the same author. The new book is larger, it contains more examples; a lot of the examples are presented in a step-by-step manner. The new examples overall are trickier than old examples which, for better or worse, tended to gravitate towards the academic side of web design rather than real life requirements often imposed upon website builders. After general introductions, the main sections of this book consist of chapters dedicated to styling text, images, navigation, tables, page layouts, forms, and putting everything together when building complete websites. A special place in the book takes the chapter on dealing with browser quirks. This is a very important chapter that teaches how to deal with browser compatibility issues; it is especially relevant as some of the examples from other chapters do not work as expected in Internet Explorer versions 6 or earlier. At the core of this book are HTML/XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), but the author also takes dives into various web technologies such as mail form scripts, PHP, JavaScript, and even mentions Ruby On Rails. There is practically no information on ASP.NET, but the web design lessons from this book are applicable to any server technology. The book appendix contains handy references of most important XHTML and CSS elements and attributes, character encoding tables, web color guide, and information on browsers and recommended software. The CSS and HTML Web Design is an excellent title containing a wealth of information useful to website designers of any level.