Professional CSS Book Review

Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design

If you create websites then you should be using CSS to aid you in creating your pages, as CSS enables developers and designers to define consistent styles on multiple pages.

Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design is for designers who understand CSS at an intermediateto advanced level, but who are looking to learn how to effecitvely develop CSS enabled designs at a professional level.

Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design teaches you how to tackle browser compatability issues, and how to layout pages into columns using only CSS. It also discusses using XHTML with CSS, how to program drop shadows on your images by using CSS, how to produce drop down menus, bounding boxes and rollovers.

Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design contains a great deal of examples of widely known websites that use CSS and the book tells you how to get the look of such sites as ESPN, University of Florida and the PGA website.

The main benefits of CSS are that you can decrease the size of your pages by putting the layout designs in the CSS file. Search engines also prefer pages of pure text with as little HTML tags as possible, which is exactly what happens when you use CSS.

The other important advantage of using CSS is that you can easily change the look of your pages by only having to change parts of the CSS file and not by going through every webpage and changing it.

If you also already use CSS but only use it for setting the colours and font types there is a lot more you can get out of CSS and this book will show you how to layout pages and more.

If you are a web designer and you don’t use CSS then this book is a great introduction to CSS and once you learn how to layout a page with CSS you will find yourself using CSS on all your sites and wonder how you ever lived without it.