Technical 26 Mar 2007 04:11 pm
Cascading Style Sheets
Cascading Style Sheets
Eric A. Meyer
This book is an excellent introduction to CSS for anyone who’s still writing web pages using plain HTML and lots of tables; it’s also a very good book for anyone who learned CSS “the hard way” (that is, by looking at other pages, copying, adapting and hacking at files). It acts not only as a good reference to the several CSS elements, selectors and other keywords, it also shows you the theory behind how they work and why they were designed how they were.
Because of that, this is a good book to be read from cover to cover; not only to be kept as a desk reference (although it is great for that, too). One point to mention is that there should be a new version at some point in the near future, as there are many, many references to Internet Explorer 6 throughout the book (mostly in sentences such as “this selector is supported by all modern browsers except IE6″), and IE7 changes the game a bit.
One slightly annoying thing about this book: it would benefit greatly from a more attentive editor. There are lots of small mistakes in several chapters, such as text referring to images that don’t show exactly what the text says, or CSS items with different names in code examples and in the text that refers to them. It’s not a serious problem, but it’s distracting, and it seems to be more common in later chapters than in the earlier ones.
This doesn’t detract from the usefulness of the book, though; it’s still a great resource to anyone working in the field.
