Product Description

"Cascading Style Sheets" can turn humdrum websites into highly-functional, professional-looking destinations, but many designers merely treat CSS as window-dressing to spruce up their site's appearance. You can tap into the real power of this tool with "CSS: The Missing Manual". This second edition combines crystal-clear explanations, real-world examples, and dozens of step-by-step tutorials to show you how to design sites with CSS that work consistently across browsers. Witty and entertaining, this second edition covers more elements of CSS 3, as well as Internet Explorer 8. 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; create effective photo galleries and special effects, including CSS-based drop shadows; make HTML forms look great without a lot of messy HTML; build complex layouts using CSS, including multi-column designs; and, style web pages for printing. With "CSS: The Missing Manual, Second Edition", you'll find all-new online tutorial pages, and broad support for Firebox, Safari, and other major web browsers. Learn how to use CSS effectively to build new websites, or refurbish old sites that are due for an upgrade.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4395 in Books
• Published on: 2009-08-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 558 pages

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 president of Sawyer McFarland Media, Inc., a Web development and training company in Portland, Oregon. He's been building websites since 1995, when he designed an online magazine for communication professionals. He's served as webmaster at the University of California at Berkeley and the Berkeley Multimedia Research Center, and oversaw a complete CSS-driven redesign of Macworld.com. David is also a writer, trainer, and teaches in the Portland State University multimedia program. He wrote the bestselling Missing Manual titles on Adobe Dreamweaver, CSS, and JavaScript.

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.