Published in CSS on Tuesday, June 13th, 2006
Rachel Andrew has put together what is described as “The most complete question-and-answer book on CSSâ€. My wife and I recently spent some time working with the book.
Please note that some links in this post are affiliate links.
The CSS Anthology was written for people who have some basic knowledge in CSS but need a place to turn to to find out what is the right way to do 'X' with CSS.
Chapter 1 provides an overview of CSS, looking at selectors, classes and ids, providing a reference about the topic more than anything. People new to CSS should look at taking some basic tutorials before diving into this book.
The book is layed out as a series of questions and answers about specific CSS issues and problems:
To help people who are learning their way through the issues presented in the book, it is broken down into 9 chapters:
I've been developing with CSS since 2001, and can easily say that I've written tens of thousands of lines of CSS.
I managed to get thru the book in a couple of hours, and in doing so I was able to refresh a few ideas that had been lost over the years and learn a few new details.
My wife has been building sites for about a year less then me, and never really picked up on CSS (she had someone around for that). She had done some online tutorials, and could hack things around a bit but had never built a website from scratch with CSS.
She spent about three days working/ skimming thru the book and then set out to build a site with this new tool by her side.
By using her basic knowledge and turning to the book for specific answers for layout and then other finer details, she was able to design a site, mark it up and write the CSS for it without any assistance from the local expert. Needless to say, this was quite rewarding.
We feel that The CSS Anthology is an excellent tool to have around for people who are looking to have a good CSS problem solving reference in the office.
If you are just getting into CSS, or are perhaps a blogger who uses Wordpress or another blogging tool that allows you to edit your CSS files, this book would be a big help in getting CSS things done.
Lastly, if you work in an office and are the local expert, always getting harassed by other folks about how to do this or that, you may want to invest in a copy of this book to help save yourself some time!
As usual, Sitepoint offers sample chapters available for free, and if you like what you see there, you can pick the book up direct from Sitepoint.
Sitepoint's web devlopment books have helped me out on many occasions both for finding a quick solution to a problem but also to level out my knowlegde in weaker areas (JavaScript, I'm looking at you!). I am recommending the following titles from my bookshelf:
I started freelancing by diving in head first and getting on with it. Many years and a lot of experience later I was still able to take away some gems from this book, and there are plenty I wish I had thought of beforehand. If you are new to freelancing and have a lot of questions (or maybe don't know what questions to ask!) do yourself a favor and at least check out the sample chapters.
The author line-up for this book says it all. 7 excellent developers show you how to get your JavaScript coding up to speed with 7 chapters of great theory, code and examples. Metaprogramming with JavaScript (chapter 5 from Dan Webb) really helped me iron out some things I was missing about JavaScript. That said each chapter really helped me to develop my JavaScript skills beyond simple Ajax calls and html insertion with libs like JQuery.
Like the other books listed here, this provides a great reference for the PHP developer looking to have the right answers from the right people at their fingertips. I tend to pull this off the shelf when I need to delve into new territory and usually find a workable solution to keep development moving. This only needs to happen once and you recoup the price of the book in time saved from having to develop the solution or find the right pattern for getting the job done..
Comments and Feedback
Is there a German version available?
Hi there!
[…] A very accosting layout and a interesting discussion topic, do you provide any Web-based services to universities or students. […]
Greetings Milos
Hello Hans, as far as I know there isn't.
This sounds like it would be a great refresher for an avid CSS user, although I think you might have some competition with Andy Budd's "CSS Mastery" along with maybe the Simple Bits book from a while back. Although it still looks like a good primer on the topic.