Web site design has grown up. Unlike the old days, when designers cobbled together chunky HTML, bandwidth-hogging graphics, and a prayer to make their sites look good, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) now lets your inner designer come out and play. But CSS isn't just a tool to pretty up your site; it's a reliable method for handling all kinds of presentation--from fonts and colors to page layout. "CSS: The Missing Manual" clearly explains this powerful design language and how you can use it to build sparklingly new Web sites or refurbish old sites that are ready for an upgrade.
Like their counterparts in print page-layout programs, style sheets allow designers to apply typographic styles, graphic enhancements, and precise layout instructions to elements on a Web page. Unfortunately, due to CSS's complexity and the many challenges of building pages that work in all Web browsers, most Web authors treat CSS as a kind of window-dressing to spruce up the appearance of their sites. Integrating CSS with a site's underlying HTML is hard work, and often frustratingly complicated. As a result many of the most powerful features of CSS are left untapped. With this book, beginners and Web-building veterans alike can learn how to navigate the ins-and-outs of CSS and take complete control over their Web pages' appearance.
Author David McFarland (the bestselling author of O'Reilly's "Dreamweaver: The Missing Manual") combines crystal-clear explanations, real-world examples, a dash of humor, and dozens of step-by-step tutorials to show you ways to design sites with CSS that work consistently across browsers. You'll learn how to: Create HTML that's simpler, uses less code, is search-engine friendly, and works well with CSS Style text by changing fonts, colors, font sizes, and adding borders Turn simple HTML links into complex and attractive navigation bars-complete with CSS-only rollover effects that add interactivity to your Web pages Style images to create effective photo galleries and special effects like CSS-based drop shadows Make HTML forms look great without a lot of messy HTML Overcome the most hair-pulling browser bugs so your Web pages work consistently from browser to browser Create complex layouts using CSS, including multi-column designs that don't require using old techniques like HTML tables Style Web pages for printing
Unlike competing books, this Missing Manual doesn't assume that everyone in the world only surfs the Web with Microsoft's Internet Explorer; our book provides support for all major Web browsers and is one of the first books to thoroughly document the newly expanded CSS support in IE7, currently in beta release.
Want to learn how to turn humdrum Web sites into destinations that will capture viewers and keep them longer? Pick up "CSS: The Missing Manual" and learn the real magic of this tool.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
Excellent book for learning CSS. Very highly recommended!:
I purchased this book with the need to learn CSS. Initially I thought that meant simply learning its syntax. This book does that well, but also goes much further to give the reader a deeper understanding of why you want to use CSS and how to apply it. Mr. McFarland has done an excellent job of explaining the "why" and "how" of using CSS to build effective web sites. He does this with a combination of useful examples, helpful illustrations, pointers to useful resources, and an entertaining writing... more info
CSS: The Missing Manual:
Superb textbook! Very readable and easy to understand. Only thing that would make it better is a spiral binder because I'll be referring back to it often.
This is the place to start when learning CSS:
How is this book excellent? 1. It is well written. 2. Most chapters have 2 styles: descriptive and prescriptive (or read this, do that). That alone would make it worth quite a bit. But then when you want to get a little deeper, it covers differences between browsers and often gives examples of how to work around those differences. But wait there is more. It references other web sources if you want to go even deeper. I agree with one reviewer, this is not the best reference manual.... more info
Very Good Book for Learning CSS:
I found this book to be very good. I usually have a hard time reading an entire book on technical subjects like this, but this one kept my interest. The tutorials are very good and give real world examples. I highly recommend downloading and completing the tutorials. Many times I found myself saying, aha, so that how you do that. I went from practically no knowledge of css to being able to create css based web designs like a pro. Highly recommended.
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