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

March 20, 2010 by · 1 Comment
Filed under: book review, CSS, Non-fiction, web design 

This book offers a very quick introduction to CSS. Styling Web Pages with CSS, by Tom Negrino and Dori Smith 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.

Links to books by Negrino & Smith on Amazon US and amazon UK.

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