Product Description

*Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a Web markup standard that allows Web designers to define the appearance and position of a Web page using special dynamic effects
*This book is the perfect beginner reference, showing those new to CSS how to design Web pages and implement numerous useful CSS effects available
*Seasoned For Dummies author Richard Mansfield explains how CSS can streamline and speed up Web development
*Explains how to take control of the many elements in a Web page, integrate CSS into new or existing sites, choose the best coding techniques, and execute advanced visual effects such as transitions
*U Features a special discussion on browser incompatibility issues involving CSS and how to solve potential problems

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19516 in Books
• Published on: 2005-03-18
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Synopsis
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a Web markup standard that allows Web designers to define the appearance and position of a Web page using special dynamic effects This book is the perfect beginner reference, showing those new to CSS how to design Web pages and implement numerous useful CSS effects available Seasoned For Dummies author Richard Mansfield explains how CSS can streamline and speed up Web development Explains how to take control of the many elements in a Web page, integrate CSS into new or existing sites, choose the best coding techniques, and execute advanced visual effects such as transitions U Features a special discussion on browser incompatibility issues involving CSS and how to solve potential problems

From the Back Cover
A step-by-step guide for stepping up from plain HTML
Create Web sites that grab attention, remain consistent, and are easy to update
Attention Web designers! CSS can be your secret weapon, and this book shows you how to use it. CSS helps you create dynamic visual effects, unify the look of your site, and deliver your site's content in a professional way that gets noticed. It even makes updates and changes a breeze. Here's what you need to get up to speed!
Discover how to

*Create practical style sheets

*Format pages that are visually pleasing

*Manage details such as colors and backgrounds

*Handle lists and tables

*Render complex documents

About the Author
Richard Mansfield was the editor of COMPUTE! Magazine from 1981 to 1987. During that time, he wrote hundreds of magazine articles and two columns. From 1987 to 1991, he was editorial director and partner at Signal Research. He began writing books full-time in 1991 and has written 36 computer books since 1982. Of those, four became bestsellers: Machine Language for Beginners (COMPUTE! Books), The Second Book of Machine Language (COMPUTE! Books), The Visual Guide to Visual Basic (Ventana), and The Visual Basic Power Toolkit (Ventana, coauthored by Evangelos Petroutsos). His books combined have sold more than 500,000 copies worldwide and have been translated into 12 languages.Richard's recent titles include Office 2003 Application Development All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies, Visual Basic .NET All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies, Visual Basic .NET Weekend Crash Course, Visual Basic .NET Database Programming For Dummies, Visual Basic 6 Database Programming For Dummies (all published by Wiley), Hacker Attack (Sybex), and The Wi-Fi Experience: Everyone's Guide to 802.11b Wireless Networking (Pearson Education, coauthored by Harold Davis).

Customer Reviews

That'll Teach Me
Teach me to read the reviews, not teach me CSS.

I've been muddling through, looking after a website based on PostNuke (content management system) for the last 4 years. Before that I had a site that was just a collection of html pages, starting with pages that I'd written in Microsoft Word before I gradually realised that Word is NOT an html editor. Eventually I decided that I need to get to grips with CSS.

The thing is, I've used the "...Dummies" books before and found them reasonably good so naturally I thought this one would be the same. No way.

I persevered when the author told me that I should ignore Firefox and other "minority" browsers because 95% of people browsing my website would be using Internet Explorer. Maybe that was true in 2005 but if so, Firefox use was 5% and growing but why would I want to alienate even 5% of my visitors? I even persevered when he told me I should use the cool Internet Explorer only filters because he said he would get to them later. But I baulked at the idea that a professional web designer could advocate using Microsoft Word as a cool way to produce html! That was chapter 3 and I haven't been able to get past that yet.

As I said, I should have read the reviews. That'll teach me.

Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer..........
Admittedly this book does present CSS in a reasonably clear and detailed manner; pretty good for the beginner.

However this authors obsession with Internet Explorer surpasses irritation.
The book was written in 2005 and apparently in 2005 Internet Explorer dominated 99% or 96% (depending which page you read) of the market. How anyone who is professionally involved with web design doesn't realise the userbase of other browsers is beyond comprehension. Web design and programming is one of the fastest changing technologies in the 21st century. This book still considers Netscape the minority competition when at the time Mozilla was hammering on the door of 14% of the market.

If you can ignore the IE only stuff Mansfield does a good job of explaining the fundementals of CSS and actually using it somewhere. If you are looking to start web design with the intention of being professional I would look elsewhere otherwise you might just find your skills don't keep up with the real world.

The only other problem with this book is that the pictured examples of code sometimes doesn't match the pictured output. Most of the time it's not a problem as the descriptions are pretty good, but sometimes it can also be crucial to the understanding.

One term for budding professionals: cross-browser-compatibility

Not a good book
If you want to learn CSS, this is not the book for you. I'm quite competent with html but don't understand a word this book is on about. It's quite a hard thing to grasp anyway but found that the web is the place to find things. This book has been of absolutely no use to me whatsoever.