Free! - Competition and mini-review of CSS Mastery - Reviews - Articles

From The Friends Of Ed Site

This book is your indispensable guide to cutting-edge CSS development—all you need to work your way up to CSS professional.

While CSS is a relatively simple technology to learn, it is a difficult one to master. When you first start developing sites using CSS, you will come across all kinds of infuriating browser bugs and inconsistencies. It sometimes feels like there are a million and one different techniques to master, spread across a bewildering array of websites. The range of possibilities seems endless and makes for a steep and daunting learning curve.

Overview

By bringing all of the latest tips, tricks, and techniques together in one handy reference, this book demystifies the secrets of CSS and makes the journey to CSS mastery as simple and painless as possible. While most books concentrate on basic skills, this one is different, assuming that you already know the basics and why you should be using CSS in your work, and concentrating mainly on advanced techniques.

It begins with a brief recap of CSS fundamentals such as the importance of meaningful markup, how to structure and maintain your code, and how the CSS layout model really works.

With the basics out of the way, each subsequent chapter details a particular aspect of CSS-based design. Through a series of easy-to-follow tutorials, you will learn practical CSS techniques you can immediately start using in your daily work. Browser inconsistencies are the thorn in most CSS developers' sides, so we have dedicated two whole chapters to CSS hacks, filters, and bug fixing, as well as looking at image replacement; professional link, form, and list styling; pure CSS layouts; and much more.

All of these techniques are then put into practice in two beautifully designed case studies, written by two of the world's best CSS designers, Simon Collison and Cameron Moll.

You'll learn how to:

Plan, organize, and maintain your stylesheets more effectively
Apply the secrets of liquid, elastic, and hybrid layouts
Create flickr™-style image maps, remote rollovers, and other advanced CSS features
Lay out forms using pure CSS
Recognize common browser bugs, and how to fix them

Who is this book for?

Beginners with at least a basic knowledge of (X)HTML and CSS and advanced users will be able to get useful information out of the book but CSS Mastery is mainly aimed at people that that have been using (X)HTML and CSS for a few years and want to master the technique.

Conclusion

The book is very well structured, has very clear illustrations and is packed with real-world advice and examples. A small drawback is that CSS hacks are explained somewhere in the middle of the book, so if you do some of the tutorials in the beginning of the book, you have to browse to the middle of the book to optimize them. A lot of the articles seem to be inspired by some of the best articles on the web, this makes the book well worth reading.

Competition

The friendly people of Friends of ED are giving away 5 books. All you need to do, to enter the competition is; download the extract (press read more and then download sample PDF on your right) and answer the following question:

Does max-width work in all browsers? Please use the exact description of the sample PDF for your answer.

Send your answer to this e-mail address, before Thursday the 16th of March 2006. Don't forget to include your post address and phone number (required for international shipping) in the e-mail.

Good Luck!