The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks, and Hacks [Paperback]

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.

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.

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.