CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

The authors of CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions have put together a book that teaches how CSS works and how to that applies to the modern web browsers in and easy-to-follow format. The book is broken into sections covering various areas of page layout as well as tips on how to work around different browser's implementations of CSS. The book also includes case studies that take readers though designing complete web site layouts as well as a solid foundation in the often-forgotten basics of CSS.

The first chapter covers how CSS works. This includes how cascading affects how rules are interpreted, the !important keyword, as well as some tips on how to organize, compress and style sheets as well as mentioning how Apache's gzip compression can help out. There is a lot of basics here that, yes, might require reading more than once to understand, but are really important to understand how to write good, compact CSS code. The section on selectors is probably also helpful if you find yourself using the jQuery library later- the way it selects markup to operate on is the same.

Chapter two covers the box model, Internet Explorer's unique interpretation of it, positioning, clearing add other bits on how elements are displayed on the page. What readers won't find in this book is any coverage of CSS3 or HTML5- and that's maybe just as well. Today it seems like while pretty much everything that isn't Internet Explorer is supporting these emerging standards in some fashion. However, for now coders using CSS3 are finding they have to repeat almost the same code three times with browser-specific prefix before each CSS3 attribute, plus the proposed "official" syntax and there's the too-familiar grey area between what different browser engines say they support and how they implement them.

After the first two chapters the book looks at how to work with images, lists and forms, providing background information and practical examples on how to create specific effects. Chapter three looks at background images and image replacement, including the four popular methods for replacing search-engine friendly and accessible text with more stylized images. Creating rounded cornered boxes and drop shadows are also demonstrated.

Chapter four and five cover styling lists to create attractive-looking interface elements. Chapter four covers styling links by adding graphics to them and creating navigation bars Chapter five covers lists and creating navigation bars, tabbed interfaces and fancy image maps, much like the ones found at Flickr and Facebook.

Chapter eight is called "Hacks and Filters" and, as the title might suggest, this is on getting around how various browser bugs and oddities- and occasionally using those oddities to make something work for you. Examples include Internet Explorer's proprietary conditional comments or actual parsing errors to import styles. Personally I'm not a big fan of relying on parsing bugs -- bugs, after all, eventually might get fixed -- but if you really need to get something working on, say, Internet Explorer for Mac, it makes sense. On the other hand, some of the bugs might be good to be aware of in case you accidentally run into them. This is a very useful chapter even if you think you know enough CSS; CSS is a standard, how it's been (mis)implemented over the years is a whole other story!

The book is not perfect. As some reviews have mentioned, there are a number of errors in the 1st edition, the Friends of Ed site has a link to corrections. Advanced developers might see a few things missing to; for instance there isn't much on caching (such as Apache's gzip or ETags support) or some utilities both off-line and on-line for compressing files, like Yahoo's CSS compressor that are important for production websites, but then again, maybe these are more a server issue than a CSS issue, as well as the aforementioned lack of CSS3 coverage which is probably for the best until things settle-down a bit more.

I'm totally new to CSS, having only recently learned the meaning of the acronym a month ago by reading Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML. Once I finished that great introductory guide I found myself wanting to learn more advanced techniques, and this book delivered.

At 350 ages this book was a relatively concise guide, and I found all 3 authors had a very readable style that included well thought-out examples to help with retention. I will admit that the editing got progressively more sloppy toward the end of the book, especially in the two case studies that were added with the new edition. However, the errors were obvious enough that it didn't impede my learning and I still greatly value this book as an exceptional guide which I know I will frequently rely upon as a reference.

What I appreciated most was the well-rounded approach to providing standards-based programming guidance while also warning the reader of browser-specific bugs you would likely encounter. Although you quickly realize Internet Explorer has done a lot of work to earn their horrific reputation among web developers, I never felt like any of the authors were anti-IE crusaders as they all tried to give credit to the IE team's efforts with each new release to improve compliance to the CSS standard... wow, I sound like I really know what I'm talking about! I suppose that in and of itself is a good recommendation for someone with less than a month of experience!

In all seriousness, this book was a great guide and reference, and it's already helped me to quickly work through a browser-specific bug that I encountered shortly after returning to my web site to use my newfound tricks. Having devoured both the Head First guide and this guide, I now feel my appetite for CSS knowledge has been satiated (and have since moved on to conquer PHP & MySQL). ;-)

5 stars, very highly recommended!!!!!

I'm an advanced CSS web designer, so I purchased this book as more of a reference, along with some new css3 ideas. At first, the book didn't impress me. But the more I dug into the book the more I enjoyed it. There are some nice topics that even advanced users can grab some tidbits and reminders. Overall, it's a book targeting beginner to intermediate level designers. I give it 4 out of 5 stars.