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CSS: The Missing Manual Book Review
Posted on 01/20/2010 at 2:34 pm by MikeLTMy 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.
