CSS Detective Guide: Tricks for Solving Tough CSS Mysteries, the

Just when you thought the world had enough books on CSS, here's one with a fantastic gimmick, zesty prose, and plenty of practical value. You'll get maximum satisfaction if you already know the basics of CSS and if you read it by moonlight during a thunderstorm in the drawing room with Miss Scarlett (or, I suppose, alone in front of your computer). Regardless, the author makes an otherwise dreary activity - debugging cranky CSS code - less of a hair-pulling nightmare and more of a follow-the-clues puzzle that *can* be solved. Recommended!

The CSS Detective Guide teaches real-world troubleshooting skills teaching how to track clues and analyze evidence behind CSS mysteries. These mysteries take the form of 'cases' as in a detective story but covering real computer issues, from stubborn browsers to LOL layouts. From layout and coding to coding mysteries that resist resolution, this is a manual any CSS programmer needs.

I don't often write reviews, but to me this book is one of the best presentations of basic CSS and how it does what it does that I have come across, ever. The trouble shooting tips and techniques are worth the price alone, but the "how and why" of CSS, HTML, and how they dance and sing together I found to be of immense help. And, for some reason it all kind of fell into place for me. Which is something that has eluded me with all the online "tutorials" and other CSS books I have looked into. I do recommend it, highly.

"Great, just what the world needs - another book about CSS" Is what some people *might* think upon learning that there's another CSS resource on the shelves to buy. Heck, I thought the exact same thing when I was approached about writing a book a few years ago, I really wondered if there was a need for what I was about to produce. Turns out there's plenty of space in the market for technical books still, and yet there are still too many coming out that cover the same ground, oftentimes the only differentiating marks being the production (colour photos, yay!). But *this* book really is something different. If you want a how-to guide on writing CSS, there are numerous choices out there, ranging from the beginner to the kind of people who get CSS but want to refine it into a real art; you got it covered. But all of these books guide you through the steps required to create your masterpieces and try to avoid covering the potential mistakes that can crop up. But the reality as a web developer is that you *will* hit upon problems, and sometimes they can be real head-scratchers to fix. If you've been in the web game for a few years, some of the solutions will come to you magically out of the ether, based on a hunch, a cumulation of years of 'bodging it to work in IE6', but for a newcomer this can be a bit daunting. What Denise has done here is write a book that's never existed (perhaps surprising that it's not been done before) and approached it in a fun way. In the first chapter, the author covers a lot of the basics of HTML and CSS, explaining concepts such as doctypes, validation, elements and attributes and so on. While there's nothing wrong with this chapter, it did strike me as somewhat superfluous, as my take on it is that this is a book aimed at developers who already know HTML & CSS - or at least enough of it to get themselves into CSS-related scrapes! - and therefore wasn't entirely needed. That said, it's important to make sure that the basics are covered regardless. No point fretting about CSS issues if you've already mangled the HTML. In some ways, you could say that this opening chapter is the book's equivalent to being on a technical support line and being asked "Is the appliance plugged in and switched on?". The second chapter goes into a bit more depth about CSS files, how to successfully and safely use CSS resets to avoid layout/alignment issues because of browsers' default rendering models. There are also tips about organising your style sheets for readability and maintainability, all of them good, before we dip in to chapter 3 where Denise outlines some techniques for diagnosing problems (e.g. using deliberately ugly CSS styles to highlight problem areas, methods for isolating the source of rendering problems through commenting or selectively cutting out markup/CSS). This is one of the most useful sections of the book (it never ceases to amaze me how some experienced developers still don't have a plan of attack for this kind of

If you're tired of the same old boring tech/web books then The CSS Detective is for you. Instead of just dragging through pages of code that put you to sleep, the author has managed to make this book enjoyable to read and packed with useful information. The format of the book is quite different than other CSS books I've looked at - the first half gives you an introduction of CSS...your "detective tools," while the second half is broken into cases that you are walked through solving. There are also a lot of funny quips thrown in through out the book that will make you do a double take now and again. If you want to familiarize yourself with CSS, this is my book recommendation.