Reviews for Beginning CSS: Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design (Programmer to Programmer)

1. Thorough but sometimes plodding

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, August 12th, 2007

   This is a very good book for beginners at CSS. It covers each topic very thoroughly, with examples and exercises throughout, so I don't think you could possibly go away without understanding the topics covered. It doesn't cover much fancy stuff such as colouring the browser scrollbars or from input fields etc but it does give a good grounding in how CSS works and the concepts, including a thorough coverage of liquid design, the CSS box model, buoyancy etc which are all absolute core concepts if you want to create a professional-looking website (without using messy/hard-to-maintain (and sooo yesterday!) tables for layout). Once you know the above the fancy stuff is just a question of picking up from a website which CSS properties to use. Also if you can't be bothered to type out all the code for the examples and exercises, you can download it in one go from the publisher's website. As the book contains a lot of code, this saves lots of time. I've docked off a star only because at times the thoroughness can get a little much (at least for me), to the point of plodding. There is a fair amount of recapitulation through explanations and examples and he seems sometimes to assume no common sense. For example instead of saying "property Y can be applied in the same way as property X" he may insist on going into detail again on property Y. Also it can get tedious going through every single change made to some of the examples especially if there are many small changes and you've already grasped from the previous explanation what properties X,Y and Z do. If you really don't like plodding, you might not like this book. That said I would rather a book that is plodding and makes sure I understand it than one which races through leaving me unsure about things, and I recognise that some of the thoroughness and detail may be useful when I come across a problem, especially with my CSS box model layout, and need to go back to a thorough explanation. This review by the way is for the non-colour edition; an up-to-date colour edition is now out.