CSS: The Missing Manual

List Price: $34.99 Discount Price: $20.47

Customer Reviews:

Best CSS Book [Posted on 2008-08-29]
I've read a few CSS books in the past and haven't been pleased at all. When I tried some of the examples in those books, it hardly ever worked like the book said it would. Most of this was caused by browser incompatibility. Now this book, explains the way things should work and then tells you how to get around some of the browser incompatibilities. And it explains it in plain English. I've been a web developer for 13 years, so some of the things are elementary to me, but it still was worth reading for the way that it explains CSS. I've actually put off learning CSS as I am mostly a ColdFusion programmer and rely on our graphic designers for CSS, but there are those times where you need to understand why CSS is acting the way it does and this book goes a long way in explaining that. It has made my life easier, now maybe I can buy a CSS reference book and know what they are talking about.

Excellent book, easy to follow tutorials [Posted on 2008-09-05]
This is an extremely well-written book that teaches sometimes complex techniques in a way that is easy to follow and understand. What's more, the tutorials actually work the way they're supposed to, without bugs, so you actually get a good learning experience by doing them. I've recommended this book to a number of people, the one person who bought it is going through the book now and loves it.

Great book, but... [Posted on 2008-09-26]
First off, I give this book a three, not because I don't think it's worth reading, but because I think there's a big missing part. I'm nearly finished reading it and working through the tutorials. Like everyone else has said, the book is very easy to read and pretty easy to follow. But in order to help readers better understand the skills and concepts, I think the author needs to challenge readers to apply what they learn in sort of workbook format. In completing the tutorials, you're presented with lots of skills and concepts, but unless you're already doing web design on your own, it's challenge to figure how to apply the skills to your own work.

After I complete each tutorial, I would go back and try to further understand what I just did. I have started my own little practice website where I'm trying to apply some of what I learned from the book.

So instead of the author spending pages and pages before each tutorial explaining concepts, it would be better to have readers practice on say a mock site. They could be given instructions for an assignment and then check their work against the finished page in the download. This approach would challenge readers to go back and apply what they learned. Maybe the author could produce some sort of workbook to go along with this book.

Also, I think some of the chapters could be supported with online video tutorials by the author. Again, at times the author presents lots of material and though it's easy to read, it's not always easy to understand.

Other than that, I do suggest working through the book. Also, I would suggest for those readers who are new to CSS, you should definitely do the work in one of the CSS editors that the author suggests in his book. Doing the tutorials in Notepad or TextEdit is not as good as doing them say with TextMate or Dreamweaver.

Finally, I would suggest that if you're new to HTML/CSS, don't start with this book. Start with HeadFirst: HTML and CSS. If I hadn't read that book first, I would have been lost in this one.

Great in depth introduction [Posted on 2008-09-30]
I found this book very helpful. I'm just starting out designing and building web sites, using CSS and Dreamweaver, and this book has been a great help to me.

Very Good Book for Learning CSS [Posted on 2008-10-04]
I found this book to be very good. I usually have a hard time reading an entire book on technical subjects like this, but this one kept my interest. The tutorials are very good and give real world examples. I highly recommend downloading and completing the tutorials. Many times I found myself saying, aha, so that how you do that. I went from practically no knowledge of css to being able to create css based web designs like a pro. Highly recommended.

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