Professional Stylesheets with HTML & XML

I would like to thank all involved in the creation of Professional Style Sheets for HTML and XML. As a new developer in Internet development I can frankly say this book is a godsend. From its cutting edge, accurate information, user-friendly writting style to its excellent layout a superb reference.This time is perhaps one of the most challenging times to enter into Internet development. There is a lot to do managing to stay current while waiting for user agents and software on the web to become 100% standardized jointly and impliment the standards properly. This book gave me a great in-depth look into using CSS and related skills effectively and sure helped smooth out the learning curve.I was easily able to find answers for on-line formatting control even when I wasn't quite sure what exactly it was I was looking for. This to me is an excellent barometer of how well written a book of this nature is. I can also say that despite having a topic that may lend itself to being a little less than exciting reading, this book was very easy to stick through entire chapters! You just have to get this one folks.

Eventhough CSS1 and CSS2 are covered, the major stress is given for XML and XSL. Using this book I created a number of good XMLized sites. It has good introduction to XML, XSL, CSS1 and CSS2. Eventhough CSS for HTML is covered less when compared to XML, this is a good book.

Style sheets are probably the next big face of change that will be widely used on the web. Using them you can place all your styling information in one document and then refer to it to apply that style to all your pages. Similarly if you change information in your style document you automatically change it in all pages -think about the time savings there! Since you put all the style information in one document -for example specifying that all headers are a certain size and a certain color- you don't need to repeat that in each page which cuts the file size of all your pages roughly in half! Pretty cool stuff.Another great that it talks about in this book, which I haven't tried yet, is manipulating the objects on the page with script. Since you identify each object on the page in the style sheet you can apparently program each object; for example making a section of text change size or color when the mouse passes over it.Style sheets also allow exact placing of ele! ments on the screen, 'floating' text and just a lot more control of everything on the page.This subject is a bit more involved than hacking out HTML on notepad so some of the chapters were a bit more involved but this book does a good job of explaining a tough subject and supplys plenty of examples. I liked it.