| | |  | Software Engineering | Home » » » CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions | | | | | | | Product Promotions: | | | | | Description: | | Building on what made the first edition a bestseller, CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions, Second Edition unites the disparate information on CSS-based design spread throughout the internet into one definitive, modern guide. Revised to cover CSS3, the book can be read from front to back, with each chapter building on the previous one. However, it can also be used as a reference book, dipping into each chapter or technique to help solve specific problems. In short, this is the one book on CSS that you need to have. This second edition contains: - New examples and updated browser support information
- New case studies from Simon Collison and Cameron Moll
- CSS3 examples, showing new CSS3 features, and CSS3 equivalents to tried and tested CSS2 techniques
What you’ll learn - The best practice concepts in CSS design.
- The most important (and tricky) parts of CSS
- Identify and fix the most common CSS problems
- How to deal with the most common bugs
- Completely up to date browser support information
- Covers CSS3 as well as CSS2 showing you the future of CSS
Who this book is forThis book will be aimed towards intermediate web designers/developers, although the examples should be simple enough for novice designers/developers with a basic understanding of CSS to grasp. Readers will probably have read beginner/intermediate instructional books such as Web Standards Solutions and will be looking for more practical and in-depth information. This book is likely to have a broad appeal, attracting intermediate developers wanting to improve their skills as well as advanced developers wanting a useful reference. The CSS 2/3 content of the book is delivered in a way that allows readers to learn CSS2 techniques that they can implement now in professional work, and then gem up on CSS3 techniques if they want to start looking towards the future. Table of Contents - Setting the Foundations
- Getting Your Styles to Hit the Target
- Visual Formatting Model Overview
- Using Backgrounds for Effect
- Styling Links
- Styling Lists and Creating Nav Bars
- Styling Forms and Data Tables
- Layout
- Bugs and Bug Fixing
- Case Study: Roma Italia
- Case Study: Climb the Mountains
| | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| Simon Collison | | Paperback:
| 366 pages | | Publisher:
| friendsofED | | Publication Date:
| October 29, 2009 | | Language:
| English | | ISBN:
| 1430223979 | | Product Length:
| 9.0 inches | | Product Width:
| 6.9 inches | | Product Height:
| 1.0 inches | | Product Weight:
| 1.55 pounds | | Package Length:
| 9.06 inches | | Package Width:
| 7.01 inches | | Package Height:
| 1.02 inches | | Package Weight:
| 1.41 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 17 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
Average Customer Review:
 ( 17 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 15 found the following review helpful:
 Solid introduction to CSSJan 26, 2010
By YYZtech.ca
The authors of CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions have put together a book that teaches how CSS works and how to that applies to the modern web browsers in and easy-to-follow format. The book is broken into sections covering various areas of page layout as well as tips on how to work around different browser's implementations of CSS. The book also includes case studies that take readers though designing complete web site layouts as well as a solid foundation in the often-forgotten basics of CSS.
The first chapter covers how CSS works. This includes how cascading affects how rules are interpreted, the !important keyword, as well as some tips on how to organize, compress and style sheets as well as mentioning how Apache's gzip compression can help out. There is a lot of basics here that, yes, might require reading more than once to understand, but are really important to understand how to write good, compact CSS code. The section on selectors is probably also helpful if you find yourself using the jQuery library later- the way it selects markup to operate on is the same.
Chapter two covers the box model, Internet Explorer's unique interpretation of it, positioning, clearing add other bits on how elements are displayed on the page. What readers won't find in this book is any coverage of CSS3 or HTML5- and that's maybe just as well. Today it seems like while pretty much everything that isn't Internet Explorer is supporting these emerging standards in some fashion. However, for now coders using CSS3 are finding they have to repeat almost the same code three times with browser-specific prefix before each CSS3 attribute, plus the proposed "official" syntax and there's the too-familiar grey area between what different browser engines say they support and how they implement them.
After the first two chapters the book looks at how to work with images, lists and forms, providing background information and practical examples on how to create specific effects. Chapter three looks at background images and image replacement, including the four popular methods for replacing search-engine friendly and accessible text with more stylized images. Creating rounded cornered boxes and drop shadows are also demonstrated.
Chapter four and five cover styling lists to create attractive-looking interface elements. Chapter four covers styling links by adding graphics to them and creating navigation bars Chapter five covers lists and creating navigation bars, tabbed interfaces and fancy image maps, much like the ones found at Flickr and Facebook.
Chapter eight is called "Hacks and Filters" and, as the title might suggest, this is on getting around how various browser bugs and oddities- and occasionally using those oddities to make something work for you. Examples include Internet Explorer's proprietary conditional comments or actual parsing errors to import styles. Personally I'm not a big fan of relying on parsing bugs -- bugs, after all, eventually might get fixed -- but if you really need to get something working on, say, Internet Explorer for Mac, it makes sense. On the other hand, some of the bugs might be good to be aware of in case you accidentally run into them. This is a very useful chapter even if you think you know enough CSS; CSS is a standard, how it's been (mis)implemented over the years is a whole other story!
The book is not perfect. As some reviews have mentioned, there are a number of errors in the 1st edition, the Friends of Ed site has a link to corrections. Advanced developers might see a few things missing to; for instance there isn't much on caching (such as Apache's gzip or ETags support) or some utilities both off-line and on-line for compressing files, like Yahoo's CSS compressor that are important for production websites, but then again, maybe these are more a server issue than a CSS issue, as well as the aforementioned lack of CSS3 coverage which is probably for the best until things settle-down a bit more.
7 of 7 found the following review helpful:
 Fantastic guide to CSS developmentApr 06, 2010
By AquaMunkee
"Aqua"
I'm totally new to CSS, having only recently learned the meaning of the acronym a month ago by reading Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML. Once I finished that great introductory guide I found myself wanting to learn more advanced techniques, and this book delivered.
At 350 ages this book was a relatively concise guide, and I found all 3 authors had a very readable style that included well thought-out examples to help with retention. I will admit that the editing got progressively more sloppy toward the end of the book, especially in the two case studies that were added with the new edition. However, the errors were obvious enough that it didn't impede my learning and I still greatly value this book as an exceptional guide which I know I will frequently rely upon as a reference.
What I appreciated most was the well-rounded approach to providing standards-based programming guidance while also warning the reader of browser-specific bugs you would likely encounter. Although you quickly realize Internet Explorer has done a lot of work to earn their horrific reputation among web developers, I never felt like any of the authors were anti-IE crusaders as they all tried to give credit to the IE team's efforts with each new release to improve compliance to the CSS standard... wow, I sound like I really know what I'm talking about! I suppose that in and of itself is a good recommendation for someone with less than a month of experience!
In all seriousness, this book was a great guide and reference, and it's already helped me to quickly work through a browser-specific bug that I encountered shortly after returning to my web site to use my newfound tricks. Having devoured both the Head First guide and this guide, I now feel my appetite for CSS knowledge has been satiated (and have since moved on to conquer PHP & MySQL). ;-)
5 stars, very highly recommended!!!!!
8 of 9 found the following review helpful:
pretty goodDec 20, 2009
By Jonathan Steinmann
I'm an advanced CSS web designer, so I purchased this book as more of a reference, along with some new css3 ideas. At first, the book didn't impress me. But the more I dug into the book the more I enjoyed it. There are some nice topics that even advanced users can grab some tidbits and reminders. Overall, it's a book targeting beginner to intermediate level designers. I give it 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
Perfect Reference And Teaching Example For Intermediate DesignersAug 09, 2011
By Hamster Army
This book hits the mark for those who have a good basic understanding of CSS, CSS3's capabilities, and have built at least several web sites with CSS and have run into the frustrations of dealing with all the browser issues out there, and who want to get a good handle on how to built navigation bars/lists, columns and styled paragraphs, text, and want a no-nonsense reference and understanding of DIV floating principles, as well as elastic and liquid layouts...without making it more complicate than it needs to be.
It is well-written, and gives you the principles you need to understand in order to do things, no matter how unorthodox, to make sure your site's styles are viewed consistently in all the major browsers, as far back as IE 5 for the Mac.
I felt the "Missing Manual" CSS book was simply too elementary for me at this stage, although I could use a better fundamental education on CSS in certain areas.
Everything from relative/absolute positioning, to styling horizontal and vertical navigation menus, to creating completely fluid web site layout basics are covered here. It's well-organized, gets to the point, and speak to you at a level it should, if you have some experience with CSS.
If you lack some confidence in your ability to design your own advanced CSS layouts, menus and effects still, but know you can do it with the right direction, this is the book for you.
I paid WAY too much for it ($40) but that is because I bought it at a brick and mortar retail location, as I make sure to browse through these types of books pretty thoroughly before deciding to buy them.
In any case, CSS books are all over the place, and there's a zillion different ways to do things, this book at least speaks to designers in an intelligent and functional fashion that just tells us what we need to know, so that we can take advanced principles and reference material, and customize our sites accordingly. If you need everything spelled out for you regarding every possible situation you run into, then you probably won't succeed in this field, it takes a basic creative mind and application of principles, and a lot of trial and error. This book does an commendable job of communicating things
Thank you!Jan 18, 2012
By Jessie_316
This book was for my brother-in-law. He sent me a letter thanking me for the wonderful gift. I appreciate that very much!
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