Beginning CSS Book Review

Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design

If you are a web developer then you need to know about CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), they allow you to move a lot of your layout and formatting into a separate .css file, which allows you to re-use your code, so it makes it easy to update the look and feel of your website, and keep the look of your website while you add new pages.

Beginning CSS takes you through all aspects of CSS including using CSS to layout XML documents. It covers text and font manipulation, drawing boxes using CSS, styling lists, setting up backgrounds. It also instructs you on positioning your design and how to use different stylesheets for different browser types, including getting your content onto handheld devices including PDAs and mobile phones.

There is a great chapter on cross browser compatibility when using CSS, all developers know about the troubles of getting web page content and designs to look the same in all browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera on both PCs and Apple Macs.

There are a great many examples in the book with a wide range of code to follow and try out. There is also an appendix at the back of the book detailing all of the available CSS commands.

My only criticism of the book is the actual web page examples themselves, they do show how CSS works but the web pages that are created by the CSS code examples are not exactly awe inspiring or the sort of pages you would want to create, the page designs look like very old pages that were created in the 1990’s.

Beginning CSS is perfect for people who are starting to use CSS or for people who already use CSS but have only used a few CSS commands and have not used the extensive areas of CSS. I would advise working all the way through Beginning CSS to get the most from the book.