The Art and Science of CSS: Create Inspirational, Standards-Based Web Designs

This is really another amazing book from Sitepoint which has been putting out a great line of web design/standards/crafting books. This book seems to follow right along the same bent: concise, well-written content at exactly the right level of detail to convey the point the authors are working on at the moment. Art & Science won't teach you the fundamentals of flow, divs, spans, or even CSS basics like classes and IDs; however, the progress through the book is so well-paced and clear that you'll be able to fill in any gaps in your knowledge as you read along. The book has seven chapters, each on a specific aspect of CSS such as Headings, Images, or Navigation. The chapters lay out basic premises of the topic, such as how you want to think about your headings as part of a page/site's branding and impact, then move on to details of creating and implementing a beautiful design. Each chapter makes its points in small, incremental steps such as starting off with basic vertical navigation, progressing to more advanced horizontal such as navigation with hover/current location changes, then finishes up with advanced concepts like matrixing menu images so you can show complex combinations simply by dealing with positioning. All of this is accomplished in a style and depth of content that's applicable to folks with rudimentary design/CSS skills (i.e. yours truely) as well as accomplished web designers. What really amazes me is that the authors hit such a broad audience (and did it well!), covered a broad range of topics in detail, and pulled it all off in just over 200 pages. (And those pages, by the way, are glorious full color.) This is a great book for learning how to deal with CSS in an elegant, well-architected fashion. It's simply a terrific book if you're doing anything at all with CSS.

Written by a whos-who of web design, the "dream team" of authors really does an outstanding job of covering the ins-and-outs of applying CSS to create impressive-looking websites. The book (in full color!) isn't huge (just 208 pages), but manages to cover a lot of ground, including Headings, Backgrounds, Navigation (particularly helpful), Images, Forms and Rounded Corners. I particularly liked the code samples which I downloaded from the publishers website (so I wouldn't have to retype), and found they worked across different browsers & platforms without needing additional tweaks. I highly recommend this book together with The Principles of Beautiful Web Design, as they work well together.

This new type of "workbook" format really visually helps display all the cool things you can do using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Plus since this book is co-authored by Cameron Adams and Jonathan Snook, there are tons of useful techniques that incorporate JavaScript with CSS. I have never seen a book that integrates CSS design techniques with JavaScript (accessible of course) and make it work seamlessly together. There are beautiful screenshots of code snippets, screenshots of what each page will look like and really makes it easy on the eyes in learning the useful techniques of CSS. It is hard to list all the cool things that are covered in this book so I will just give a highlight. Chapter 1- Image Replacement with CSS, Flash Image Replacement (sIFR) and JavaScript Chapter 2 - Creating an image gallery: Styling the images, creating thumbnails, creating an album page; Styling contextual images, manipulating borders and padding, using floats for alignment of text and images, stacking and transparency (IE6 and IE7) Chapter 3 - Using the background styles for images, creating a case-study design (Deadwood Design), absolute and relative positioning of images, using multiple background images (CSS3) Chapter 4 - Creating navigation lists: Basic Vertical Navigation, IE issues (whitespace issue versus Firefox), creating a class for remember where user is in list; Basic Horizontal Navigation: Tabbed navigation, variable tab width issues, hover styles, creating multiple level navigation. Chapter 5 - Forms: Labeling form elements (); fieldset and legend tags, creating table-less form layouts; styling error message labels for validartion (JavaScript) Chapter 6 - Rounded Corners - Everything you ever wanted to about creating nicely rounded corners Chapter 7 - Tables, creating some nicely styled professional looking tables with CSS and JavaScript. If you have been using CSS for awhile this book is a useful reference for specific techniques you have had trouble with or if your new to CSS it will help you learn all the cool things you can do with CSS but never thought to think of. The book is written in an easy to learn format that is great for any level. Go get it!

The Art and Science of CSS was a quick read (208 pages) and packed full of valuable code examples. Unlike other CSS books that teach you the specifics of CSS with vague examples (not vague in a bad way), this book teaches you specific examples and gives you extra resources. This book is somewhat of a `cookbook` of commonly used CSS methods. Each author brings their unique writing style to the table, and each chapter focuses on a specific aspect of design and its CSS and styling methods. Chapter 1 stars with Headings. The author of this chapter gives a brief introduction to hierarchy and branding, and how you can achieve more control with your look and typography. As typography is discussed, he moves on to talk about image replacement and the many techniques available to us today. There is no perfect solution when it comes to image replacement, but the author does a great job of showing current methods, their advantages, and their disadvantages (including an in-depth section on sIFR). Chapter 2 is all about Images. The author starts by showing you how to create a basic, but aesthetically pleasing, image gallery. The task at hand is to create the enlarged version, the thumbnail page, and the galleries page while keeping the markup lean and semantic. Each of these are put together very nicely with flair not usually seen in off the shelf image galleries. The author also discusses how to create images (in context) with captions, including a nice use of transparent PNGs. The author's creative use of captions give you options `outside of the box' (both semantically and philosophically) of normal captions that are seen all around the web. Chapter 3 shows us that backgrounds don't have to be boring. This is a very simple chapter that discusses backgrounds of the past (repeating pictures, large pictures, etc), and then looks forward to the present in getting creative with your backgrounds. He uses a case study as an example, and it shows specifics of positioning and layering. Chapter 4 jumps into Navigation. Different types of navigations are discussed (vertical, horizontal, tabbed, variable width, etc) and shown with specific examples. The author shows how to take from each of those to create advanced navigation systems using images and your semantic markup. I think that from this chapter a user could create an advanced navigation - simply because the foundation is set pretty solid before he gets to the advanced section. This chapter goes hand-in-hand with chapter 1 when talking about image replacement. Chapter 5 discusses the dreaded (sometimes feared) Forms. Forms come in all shapes and sizes - and it is up to us to build them accordingly with the user in mind. The styling in this chapter spruces up what is a rather mundane form - while giving you great flexibility and hooks to extend yourself. The author discusses the several different layout types (top aligned label, left aligned label, right aligned label) and shows how to enhance each. If you w

This is a how-to, cookbook kind of book that does a good job of focusing on the most important "black magic" aspects of CSS. In a well-written, couple of hundred pages it manages to do a good job of covering images, backgrounds, navigation, forms, tables, and even those blasted rounded corners. (Who knew they required so much extra work?) The accompanying pictures are in color - which seems like a no-brainer for website design books, but isn't always the case. That and the clearly-written code samples make learning how to create visually impressive websites relatively painless - and fun for a change.