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CSS: The Missing Manual Book Review

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 by MikeLT

My reason for picking up this book in the first place was as a refresher course, to reinforce and augment my already pretty basic knowledge of the subject of cascading stylesheets. Since I did not really have a manual, and the second editions publication date seemed to indicate it was up to date, I figured this book would be as good as any.

CSS: The Missing Manual, Second Edition, by David Sawyer McFarland is divided into five parts, the last being reserved for Appendixes. Part I covers the basics, and is indeed geared toward the absolute novice. A bit boring, I was able to skim through the majority of chapters, sparing myself the tedious long winded explanations that a beginner might be more apt to appreciate. That said, this part did do a good job covering the basics, with some pretty good explanations on the importance of Document Type and W3C validation. Inheritance, and the cascading nature of style sheets is also introduced, as well as the concept that HTML is for markup, CSS for styling, a theme that occurs throughout the book.

Part II, Applied CSS as one might expect, gets down to the actual formatting of the elements that make up a web page. Text, graphic, and image formatting is addressed, as well as dealing with white space. Formatting links and navigation bars is also included, with one chapter devoted to styling tables and forms exclusively with CSS.

Part III delves into CSS page layouts, covering the standard conventions of fixed and float based layouts, with extra attention given to absolute, relative, and fixed positioning of elements.

Advanced CSS in Part IV includes some meaty subjects that seasoned veterans will appreciate. Managing media, print, and multiple stylesheets are dealt with, the “styling of stylesheets” is addressed (a sort of CSS etiquette), and one section devoted to managing Internet Explorer hacks, a subject that is well covered throughout the book.

Finally, the last chapter gives us a peek at the next generation of CSS. By no means exhaustive, (I would have liked to have seen more on rounded corners) this chapter highlights some of the new CSS 3 tricks, also mentioning the browsers they work with at the time of this writing. The author duly points us to the W3C CSS 3 website for further information.

All in all, CSS: The Missing Manual second edition is a comprehensive study of cascading style sheets suitable for any aspiring web developer just getting their feet wet. Getting deeper into the book, one encounters more complicated concepts that may need a second read.

For the experienced web developer, The Missing Manual would well deserve a place on the bookshelf as a reference, with the appendixes in Part V well worth a read through for resources, and further information on the properties and values of CSS in the development community.

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