Beginning CSS Web Development: From Novice to Professional

Having tried (and then abandoned) a couple of very dry CSS books, I finally found this excellent and surprisingly readable effort.The book is divided into chapters dealing with the main components of a web page (e.g. tables, headings, images, spacing, layout etc.) and shows how to manipulate and control each aspect through CSS. At the end of the book is a creative and fun case study that brings all you've learned together to build a site for a fictional band.A few points to bear in mind. (1) I don't think you will get much out of the book by passively reading it. You really do have to follow along and try the exercises to see how CSS affects a page. Better yet, have your own project that you can work on alongside. It's easy to suffer from information overload when learning CSS and the only way to make sure as much as possible sinks in is active learning. (2) The book is pre-CSS3. I don't think this makes the book any less useful. After all, you still need a good understanding of CSS. (3) The book makes a good job of creating cross-browser compliant CSS. However, unsurprisingly, IE6 is a complete mess when it comes to compliance. I for one have stopped designing for IE6 altogether. Why let the tail wag the dog? (A 10-year old tail at that). If you're still designing for IE6 - some of the CSS may render like a dog's dinner. Blame the browser, not the book.Good practice, clearly set out and made as fun as CSS can be. Recommended.

In my mission to learn CSS I purchased this book and the missing manual I ended up reading this book first and I've never picked up the missing manual, simply because this book covered everything.Great exercises through out the book showing you everything you need to know. If you have used HTML before the first few chapters will be tedious. But it is still a good read, the best part about this is the last chapter. Something which you don't see to much of in any books is a working Project example as he talks you through the creation of a band website. This chapter by far is the most important and has certainly helped me use the skills in that chapter to make my own websites.Only negative thing to add is that time is flying past since this book was published in 2006 and now CSS3 is being brought in but not covered in this book of course but this is a great start point for anyone and will certainly make it easy for you to get where you want to.

The book is really well written and easy to follow . It allows you to download the code used in each chapter for you to copy & paste into your editor without the need for lots of typing. This is especially useful as a colon typed where a semi colon is required can make the whole CSS instruction fail.While I really recommend this book to people already competent in HTML I don't think it is for an absolute beginner to web creation.Using the book I've converted my HTML web sites into much smarter CSS/html and all in all I'm glad to have bought it. My copy still talks of IE5 so it is worth checking the date publshed as that's a bit out of date.

I would have given this 4 stars but the content is well out of date now. In general, the topics are covered well, but the content is showing its age, having been written in 2006 and never revised since. It's not really relevant to to know about workarounds to support IE5.5 any more for example and the website page created in the exercises also looks very dated and un-modern. There are a few minor typos that will also confuse some people briefly. Having said that, the content covered what I needed to know in reasonable depth with practical examples, but you may find you want an addtional and more up to date book on this subject.

A very useful and easy to use book, much easier than trying to read from the screen while trying to create a website. Anyone can use this book and learn a new skill.