Product Description

The most authoritative quick reference available for CSS programmers. This handy resource gives you programming essentials at your fingertips, including all the new tags and features in CSS 2.0. You'll get concise information on designing and deploying complex style sheets as well as details on browser support.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #547273 in Books
• Published on: 2001-03-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

From the Back Cover
Improve Web Design and Delivery with this Useful Programming Language!

Make your Web design and development more potent by using Cascading Style Sheets to define and deliver your pages. Attach CSS to structured documents to influence presentation without adding new HTML tags or sacrificing device independence. Build cohesive pages from multiple sources using CSS ordering to help eliminate conflicts. Structure and offer consistent content using STYLE attributes of individual element tags, LINK elements, and imported style sheets. Let this Programmer's Reference be a tool for quick and accurate access to CSS 2.0 specifics, and realize the Web's ideal of separating presentation and content.

• Design and deploy CSS effectively with this concise reference
• Utilize the most direct means of presenting Web content as you intend it to be viewed
• Understand the properties and values of CSS, including visual, paged, and aural media styles, plus selectors, pseudo-elements, pseudo-classes, at-rules, and more.

About the Author
Eric A. Meyer (Cleveland, OH) has been working with the Web since late 1993. He is currently the Internet Applications Manager for the OPAL Group, an information technology firm in Cleveland, Ohio. Eric is an Invited Expert and member of the W3C CSS&FP Working Group, and he is responsiblr for coordinating the creation of the W3C's CSS Test Suite. Eric continues to remain active on CSS newsgroups and edits Web Review's Style Sheets Reference

Customer Reviews

Great and Thorough Reference- say it out loud.... REFERENCE
This is a reference book.
It says that in the title but some of the negative reviews on this book seem to have overlooked that. It is NOT a turorial. It is NOT going to be a magic book to give you all your ideas so you don't have to think and have good design skills.

What it is...
A really good, thorough, reference book on CSS2. This guy knows his stuff and presents it clearly and without any clutter. It is laid out so you can easily find every element, property, and atribute there is. Sure you could go to the World Wide Web Consortium's web site for the info, but when you're in the middle of coding - a good REFERENCE book is still tops for getting info fast. And in my opinion, the layout of the book makes more sense than the w3's web site (though it is valuable too).

To those just starting with CSS-
This book may be hard to grasp at first. Buy it anyway. Find a few web sites to get the basics down because this will be the book you'll want to have after your first week, when what you need is a reference and not a dumbed down overworded tutorial with examples that don't fit your application anyway.

Authoritative, serious, concrete
If either HTML or XML is a serious part of your livelihood, you need this book. With every property of CSS level 2 explained in a compact manner -including examples- the book can be a real time saver.

Eric's experience in the application of this advanced technique and his participation in the Web community is expressed in the organization and clarity of this book. No hand-holding tutorials here, just the facts and the context which gives those facts meaning.

And if that is not compact enough for you, Chapter 8 "CSS2 Quick Reference," condenses the material even more. Also handy is the lengthy chart on browser compatibility.

I can only fault the book for not going beyond its purpose. That is, the book covers the CSS specification properties only. In particular, styles implemented by Internet Explorer, which may be extremely handy yet not officially approved, are not covered.

Best CSS2 quick reference I have
Now this is my kind of book, a well stocked reference without all the fluff that usually comes with the explaination of each new idea or concept. You know the sort, a book that you can refer to again and again after learning the basics because it is well organised and laid out. Of course, the reference only style of Cascading Style Sheets 2.0: Programmer's Reference is not really suited to those that are completely new to the topic. Having said that, those familiar with the idea of style sheets might be able to put something together if they mix and match the numerous examples.

Unfortunately there are very few illustrations or screen shots to help you grasp difficult ideas, which sometimes results in long and wordy descriptions of the various properties. I found myself skimming over such busy paragraphs because I knew the idea they were trying to describe, but anyone unfamiliar with the ideas may find themselves getting frustrated trying to work out exactly what it is that is being said. A few more well placed illustrations would have made it easier to use.

Another thing that annoyed me was the repetition of paragraphs while detailing the properties. While I can understand the need to repeat the paragraphs (after all, it is a reference book!), it did get rather tired, particularly when looking up related properties or attributes.

Despite these little annoyances, it makes an ideal quick reference book. The headings and text are clear, the pages easy to scan and alphabetical ordering makes it easy to find attributes by name. There is no obvious distinction between CSS1 and CSS2, but important differences in implementation of the two are pointed out when relevant.