Styling Web Pages with CSS: Visual QuickProject Guide, by Tom Negrino and Dori Smith

March 20, 2010 by Nekkidblogger
Filed under: CSS, Non-fiction, book review, web design

This book offers a very quick introduction to CSS. It consists of a quick rundown of most of the major syntax in CSS. It does not contain anything people with a little experience with CSS do not already know. Rather it provides a cursory and very hasty introduction from which readers can build their CSS knowledge.

The book starts with the basics – rules, selectors, classes, IDs, the cascade, internal and external style sheets, Divs, boxes, floats, padding, margins – everything is covered, both in a very basic manner. Next are styling elements, working with images, menus and navigation, and moving styles from internal to external style sheets. Rounding out this project-based guide is working with browsers, both old and new, and debugging CSS.

Styling Web Pages with CSS is very succinct and to the point. However, there are some minor mistakes in it, and there are lots of things that are not explained – so while most of the recommendations in the book work, it is very hard to understand why, and the book provides very little in the way of recommendations for where to go to learn more about particular topics or find more in-depth information.

I would consider this book an introduction for people liking to learn visually. However, it has limited value at all beyond the very first introduction. Generally I would say that this is one of the weaker Visual QuickProject books, and it was not as good as I had expected it to be.

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Tags: book review, CSS, Tom Negrino and Dori Smith, Web pages

Comments

One Comment on Styling Web Pages with CSS: Visual QuickProject Guide, by Tom Negrino and Dori Smith

Tom Negrino on Sun, 21st Mar 2010 11:19 am

Thanks for reviewing our book!

As you might imagine, trying to introduce a topic as complex as CSS in a 150 page book that includes lots of big color pictures (which is the format for the Visual QuickProject series) was somewhat of a daunting task. Our thought before we wrote it was that CSS has plenty of big, thick books that assume lots of prior knowledge of Web development, and that really dig into the details of how and why CSS works. As I recall, we suggest some of those books at the end of our book, because we knew that if we did our job right, people would want to know more about CSS.

Did we know that we would have to leave out explanations and examples, simply because we would not have the space? Sure. Going in, our publisher had told us that we had a maximum page count. We were certain that experienced reviewers would say, as you did, that the book needs more of this or that.

Our goal was to demystify CSS and show how it is, at its heart, something that anyone can create and use to build their own Web sites. Too many people, even those who are familiar with HTML markup, look at CSS for the first time and find it confusing. We wanted to provide a gentle, “just enough,” introduction to CSS for those folks, and we think we succeeded.

It’s our hope that people will read and enjoy our book, successfully learn some CSS, then confidently move on to other books or Web sites to learn more.

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