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I am really excited about this book! Web designing is sometimes difficult because your planned designs may look different in various browsers and platforms. Sometimes the results are not pretty. Many web designers use tables to insure better consistency across browsers. Tables are for …well tables…and then there is all that extra code. The standards are moving from the table and layout formatting to a more capable code set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Today's CSS, in some cases, are browser specific and until the various browsers implement the code set by the W3C it will remain a challenge designing websites.
Rachel Andrew's book "The CSS Anthology - 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks" is all about Cascading Style Sheets (CSS 2.1). CSS is a language that is used to define the formatting applied to a website including colors, background images, fonts, margins and indentation. Although you can do all the same things with HTML, CSS allows you to make your code leaner, has the ease to make site wide changes, and with HTML formatting, these elements are deprecated (flagged to be removed in future specifications).
Chapter 1 is a short nine page basic CSS tutorial brush up. This book is for people who have some understanding of Cascading Style Sheets. The remainder of the eight chapters has "How do I" questions with a solution and a discussion. You can go to a specific problem you are having and find the solution immediately. You don't have to type the CSS code examples shown in the book as you can download the code at the "Code Archive" link on the book's website at http://www.sitepoint.com/books/cssant1. The author encourages you try out the various supplied codes as she feels, as I do, that you learn by doing, rather than just reading. There is plenty of support on the Sitepoint website besides the downloadable code, as you can also access the Sitepoint forums and newsletters.
The author, Rachel Andrew, is a Web developer and director of Web solutions provider edgeofmyseat.com. She has co-authored several books promoting the practical usage of Web standards. She lives in the UK. Visit Sitepoint, the publisher in Australia for sample chapters. To order, go to the O'Reilly website.
I highly recommend this book especially if you are a Web designer and want to handle Cascading Style Sheets in a more manageable manner and in a format that is easily understandable.
As a bonus, buy The CSS Anthology from SitePoint.com and receive a $9.95 USD CSS Reference Poster, free of charge, when you purchase online.
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