Review: The CSS Anthology - 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks
Iain Laskey moves on to the next level of CSS learning
| Product | The CSS Anthology |
|---|---|
| Company | Sitepoint |
| Web | www.sitepoint.com |
| Price | £24.99 |
| We like | Writing style, content, clean attractive layout |
| We don't like | Nothing |
| Rating | 10/10 |
| Requirements |
The road to CSS enlightenment is full of pitfalls and frustrations but is definitely worth it, indeed essential for anyone who wants to develop web sites properly.
Whilst the basics are reasonably easy to grasp and pick up, after a while it seems to mutate into some sort of black magic with all manner of arcane and mysterious knowledge being needed to progress. This is often around the point you start to build a full blown CSS styled site for the first time. You've read the book(s) but suddenly find yourself hitting brick wall after brick wall as you try to do all those common tasks you used to manage so easily before. How do you do navigation? Fluid 2 column layouts? What about coping with browser bugs and incompatibilities? That's when you really need a good CSS recipe book and we think The CSS Anthology by Rachel Andrew is just what the doctor ordered.
The book is divided up into broad categories including text styling, images, navigation, tabular data (no tables for layout here!) and forms. Within each of these are a number of "How do I...?" questions and solutions. These include expected ones such as 'How do I indent text?' and 'How do I add borders to an Image?' as well as more unusual ones like 'How do I make a Submit button look like text?'. Each one is accompanied by chunks of CSS and/or HTML and copious screen shots including intermediate stages as well as discussion on the what's and why's by following a problem/solution/discussion format.
The author's writing style is excellent. She manages to keep her explanations to the point but without being terse. The examples are well chosen, the code crystal clear. The layout is also very attractive with a clean uncluttered look and printed on brilliant white paper.
Having covered off a range of typical Q&A's most developers are likely to come up with, the CSS Anthology then delves into deeper areas with further chapters on cross-browser techniques including various well known hacks, handling different browser limitations and guidance on using tools such as the W3C validator. The book also covers the all too important area of accessibility and handling alternative devices such as screen readers. This section includes some excellent tips on minimising duplicate code in your CSS style sheets whilst offering facilities like separate print styles. Finally, the author has some good ideas on testing across multiple browsers with the advice being both Windows and Mac pertinant.
Oddly, the book then returns to more regular material with more problem/solution/discussions on the thorny area of CSS positioning and layout with two and three column, liquid and fixed layouts being described and explained as well as some neat solutions for getting rounded corners although the easiest one doesn't work on non Mozilla browsers such as Internet Explorer without some extra work.
Conclusion
We thought this was a really good book. It covers a lot of ground and serves well to educate the reader in the middle ground between getting the basics right and learning the heavy duty stuff that comes under the guru category. At the time of writing, it was also timely with notes on IE7 which was appreciated. It claims to be a book of practical solutions rather than theory driven and as such, it does what it says on the tin. The author's clear style combined with the easy to follow layout makes for an enjoyable book that we can't recommend enough.
