Before this book it was only Eric Meyer’s Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide (O’Reilly) and Jeffrey Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards (New Riders) that made a significant impact on me, each for different and valuable reasons. To be fair, every book on CSS has something to consider, but too often do books unnecessarily rehash dated material or go the other way and introduce experimental (often asemantic) techniques that are impractical for the day. CSS Mastery is one of the few exceptions.
The book’s first chapter is essentially a review of key (but important) CSS principles, yet is refreshingly clear and pleasing. Even experienced CSS folks will take comfort here in affirming what they may (or may not) already know. From there things only get better, with pristine explanations of what has become the most applicable methods for handling presentation of images, lists, tables, forms, and more.
And that’s not all, template layouts are covered in exactly the same way; fresh explanations of columnar techniques and contemporary handling of flexible widths. Want more? You’ve got it. Ever found yourself scouring the Web for the same hacks time and again to deal with buggy browser? Search no more, each bug killing trick is concisely detailed in such a simple manner as to make you wonder what all the buggin’ fuss was ever about.
Wrapping it up and bringing it home are two case-study chapters by Cameron Moll and Simon Collison, respectively, that put all the book’s concepts to practice, and then some. CSS Mastery is a solid, ejoyable read from front to back—and you will learn something.
Having sung such praise, there are a couple of things I would point out for consideration. First this might not be the book to start with if you are a CSS beginner (it is “Mastery” after all), but don’t let that stop you from picking it up, because it’s definitely one to have in your collection when you’ve sowed your oats. CSS books that may come out soon will have a hard time beating the practical value of this one, most likely falling into the rehash and/or experimental (CSS 3) arena.
Second, and specifically in regard to the chapters dealing with hacks, filters, and bug hunting, I would like to have seen less focus on older (and arguably obsolete) browsers like Internet Explorer (IE) for Macintosh, and inversely, more emphasis on the benefits of using conditional comments to deal with Win IE bugs over what history has shown to be more popular, hackier methods. But that’s dipping into different waters and not a bad reflection of this book. If anything you’ll be wiser about what hacks not to employ (if you’re careful) as we move into a new age of browser competition and relevancy.
Bottom line: if you’re on the road to mastering CSS, get your hands on CSS Mastery, it’s a key milestone on that journey.
Product Details
Paperback: 280 pages
Publisher: friends of ED (February 13, 2006)
ISBN: 1590596145
Links
Pics from inside the book
