Product Description

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; and, 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #110266 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 494 pages

Review
"Almost 500 pages of CSS help, with more than 100 pages of practical tutorials to guide you through the process of implementing and refining CSS to save you many a wasted hour. At GBP25, you'll be hard pressed to find a better guide to designing with CSS." .NET, February 2007

From the Publisher
Cascading Style Sheets are now a reliable method for handling
all kinds of Web page presentations -- from fonts and colors to page
layout. But due to CSS's complexity most designers treat it as a kind of
window-dressing to spruce up the appearance of their sites without tapping
into the real power of CSS. CSS: The Missing Manual clearly explains this
powerful design tool and how you can use it to build sparklingly new Web
sites, or refurbish old sites that are ready for an upgrade.

About the Author
David Sawyer McFarland is the president of Sawyer McFarland Media Inc., a web development and training company located in Portland, Oregon. In addition, he teaches JavaScript programming, Flash, and web design at the University of California, Berkeley, the Center for Electronic Art, the Academy of Art College, and Ex'Pressions Center for New Media. He was formerly the webmaster at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Berkeley Multimedia Research Center.

Customer Reviews

Without doubt the best coding book in the world ... ever!!
I have read countless coding books, from HTML to JAVA, all of which claim to be the book you need, the one must have. To date none have stood up to that claim. Without exception I have finished the book and looked back wondering just how much I have taken in and learnt - if I'm lucky 20%. That is till now.
CSS - The Missing Manual is, in my opinion, a great book from all aspects. It's enjoyable to read, the tutorials work, the subject is explained in all it's glory, warts an' all, and I'd read it again (sadly just because I enjoyed it so much). It covers so much and actively demonstrates the shortcomings of CSS and browser compatibility - and then gives you the simple fixes to the problems. How refreshing (pardon the pun).
It also gives you a wealth of other excellent reference points (mainly web sites) to build upon the book content further.
Thank you David Sawyer McFarland for this quite brilliant book.

The best introduction to CSS
You will still want to consult Cederholm (Web Standard Solutions and Bulletproof Web Design) and Andrew (The CSS Anthology) but this is simply the best introduction to CSS available. It explains the concepts involved clearly and in a logically structured manner. Cederholm's and Andrew's books are more for dipping into when you have a specific problem. McFarland teaches you CSS from the ground up.

That is not to say that this is a book simply for novices. Although I count myself as a pretty raw recruit it seems to me there is much for anyone interested in CSS in this book.

It certainly pays to have this book by your side when trying to learn from the stylesheets [...]

The missing manual? It's not kidding
I thought it was time to brush up and improve my css and try to crack page layout and other problems which I have never understood. Boy am I glad I found this book. I read the first half and although I didn't do the tutorials - as I knew most of it - it filled in so many gaps and made things I thought I understood so much clearer. Going beyond the basics at each page I found myself saying 'oh thats how its done' and so on. Here are some reasons I liked it:
- Good style, not too chatty kept to the point, I hate technical books that waffle on and on.
- Clear explainations, not afraid to get technical, sometimes suggesting the reader may want to skip the techy bits and come back later.
- Very good tutorials.
- Not afraid to refer readers to all sorts of supporting websites.
- Dealt very well with IE issues (and there are loads of them). I highlighted the IE problems - there is a lot of yellow in my copy! But I understand all the hacks now.

The only fault I could find is the section on formatting forms - it would have been useful to have a short section on where to go to find out about how to submit forms - but hey, that's a minor point.

I wish all technical books were written like this - it remined me of the PC Maintenance and Upgrade Bible I bought years ago - what a book - All the other books in the 'Bible' series were a constant let-down, I will be very interested to try some other 'Missing manual' books and see if it can keep up this extremely high standard.