The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks, and Hacks: Amazon.co.uk: Rachel Andrew: 9780957921887: Books

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Digital Web Magazine

If you’ve been struggling with building Web sites using Web standards and CSS, you really must buy this book.

Lowter.com

The CSS Anthology is a great book to get someone started on actually implementing CSS.

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27 Reviews

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4.7 out of 5 stars (27 customer reviews)

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85 of 86 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very, very useful., 8 Sep 2005

By A Customer

This review is from: The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks, and Hacks (Paperback)

This book is quite simply the most useful book on CSS I own, and it's great for several reasons.

Firstly, it addresses real world problems (for example, two-pane layout, three-pane layout, navigation tabs, footers, tabular data, drop-down menus, calendars).

Secondly, there is minimal fluff: the introduction is only 10 pages long (and still contains some technical information), and the first "How do I ...?" starts on page 11; compare this to some books that pad endlessly with pontification about The Bad Old Days of HTML and cross-browser incompatibility.

Thirdly, the recipes are presented in an extremely approachable, standalone format; typically:

1. The question (for example, "How do I create tabbed navigation with CSS");
2. The solution, usually a complete XHTML page (from DOCTYPE to </html>);
3. A screenshot of the result, sometimes in different browsers;
4. A discussion of the technique used.

More complicated recipes will build up the solution bit by bit, showing screenshots of the intermediate solutions to illustrate precisely what problem next needs to be addressed.

Lastly, the author really seems to "get" how important web standards and accessibility are; she exhorts the web designer to test in text-only browsers like Lynx to ensure web sites are accessible to blind and disabled people, and frequently points out Internet Explorer's poor compatibility, and even knows about "minority" browsers like Konqueror.

Compare this to "CSS Web Design For Dummies", which glibly says:

"Some incompatibility issues still exist, but this book deals with them only occasionally ... you need not write complex workaround code to take into account an audience so small that ... many Web pages simply ignore them. [...] History has elected Internet Explorer as the standard ... Just relax and assume that your Web page visitors [are] using IE."

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55 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I enjoyed reading the CSS Anthology, 25 Jan 2005

By

Miguel Witte (Linares, Spain) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks, and Hacks (Paperback)

I have enjoyed reading the CSS Anthology because it is one of those (rare?) computer books which gets directly to the point, explaining things in a clear and straightforward manner, from the first to the last page.
Learning how to use CSS for website-building is certainly a difficult task. While it is easy to get a basic grasp of that language from many online-tutorials, I found it very complex to learn how to use CSS for more advanced topics like, how to position elements on a web page. Therefore, I was glad having bought this book.
The title of the book: "The CSS-Anthology - 101 essential tips, tricks and hacks" describes the content of the book very well, since it is exactly that - 101 ways about how to achieve different tasks divided in to nine chapters covering the following topics: 1. Getting Started with CSS, 2. Text Styling and Other Basics, 3. CSS and Images, 4. Navigation, 5. Tabular Data, 6. Forms and User Interfaces, 7 Browser and Device Support, 8. CSS Positioning and Layout, 9. Experimentations, Browser Specific CSS and Future Techniques.
Each and everyone of the 101 tips and tricks comes with an explanation, the respective source code and a discussion part in which the author explains how the CSS-code works and why. It is really like participating in a course, or a workshop and I realized that every tip and trick is based on practical experience and proficiency with CSS. Therefore, I was not surprised to see that Rachel Andrew, the author of the book, works as a professional web developer. Since the same CSS-code can lead to different results in different browsers (depending on the level of CSS implementation in the respective browsers) Rachel Andrew provides also many workarounds and hacks to make sure that one website looks the same, in different browsers.
Learning CSS is something complex and achieving a good level of competence in this field requires a lot of time-consuming online-research, something which can be avoided by reading this book, which covers all important areas for web design, with concrete and practical solutions. Finally I would like to say that, although I am not a native English reader, I found it easy to read the book. It is really a "readable book" and worth reading.

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40 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Book, 13 Nov 2006

By

Martin "Martin" (Manchester) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks, and Hacks (Paperback)

This book was recommended for a course I took on Advanced Web Design and CSS.

I have developed three web sites using it, each one using more and more adventurous and clever little CSS techniques from this book.

I'd recommend it highly. It's very hands on and tackles many of the day to day problems that any beginner or intermediate designer trying to build a web site will inevitably run into pretty quickly.

I've seen quite a few IT books in my time and, let's face it, lots of them are far too 'techie' and so full of information that you don't know where to start on them. Many of them make you want to groan out loud just looking at them.

I found this book refreshingly down to earth and practical and not bogged down with loads of information that the average web designer isn't going to use ever anyway.

If you buy this book, don't forget to go to Sitepoint's web site where you can download all the examples used in the book.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars CSS Anthology
This is a very useful book for someone with a basic knowledge of CSS. It is full of examples which can be picked up and used at any time. I started using it straight away. Read more

Published 8 months ago by ronwooduk