The Ultimate CSS Reference

stoolpigeon writes "Cascading Style Sheets are now the dominant method used to format web pages. Even something as simple as modifying a WordPress blog can involve digging around a bit in CSS. A quick search at Amazon on CSS returns over 7 thousand books in the computer category alone. This book claims to be the ultimate, though, and that made me approach it with a bit of skepticism. Sure, it could be a decent reference, but is it truly the ultimate reference? I admit I was curious to see." Read on for the rest of JR's review.

The Ultimate CSS Reference
author	Tommy Olsson & Paul O'Brien
pages	420
publisher	SitePoint
rating	9/10
reviewer	JR Peck
ISBN	978-0-9802858-5-7
summary	All the CSS knowledge you'll ever need.

If any book is going to be an acceptable reference there are a few things that are going to need to be in place, no matter what the subject matter. I'd like to discuss those first, from front to back. The table of contents takes up 9 pages. It is specific enough to easily get the reader pointed in the right direction.

The first two chapters cover introductory material, discussing just what CSS is, what it does, and syntax/nomenclature issues. After that, every chapter is reference material, until chapter 16. The last three chapters cover vendor specific properties, various hacks and work-arounds as well as the difference between html and xhtml. Those five chapters are presented more as straight out prose compared to the reference chapters between, though they still use extensive highlighting and background colors to divide and organize content.

The reference chapters are extremely well laid out. A command, property or other item is in bold at the beginning. Below it, highlighted in grey are various arguments that can be used with that item. An example will be given in a colored box. There are two grids. One covers three aspects of the spec for this item; if it is inherited, the initial value and thecss version of the item. There is also a list of browser support for the item in IE6+, FF1+, Saf 1.3+ and Op9.2+. The second grid shows compatibility for three versions of Internet Explorer (5.5, 6.0 and 7.0), three versions ofFirefox (1.0, 1.5 and 2.0), three versions of Safari (1.3, 2.0 and 3.0) and Opera 9.2. When appropriate there is also a discussion of or list of appropriate values and discussion of usage.

At the end of the book is a single appendix which contains an alphabetical index of properties. There is no proper index for the full book, which is not as bad as it could have been, without the other tools, but is still disappointing.

The typography is clear. The book is concise and clear with little wasted space or verbiage. The color scheme for highlighting the various sections is extremely easy to read and pleasant.

There is one more feature of the book that, aside from content, makes it very useful. There is an online edition of The Ultimate CSS Reference and as far as I can tell, it is completely open to use by anyone without any kinds of restrictions. I couldn't find any in my copy of the book, I didn't have to sign up for anything to use the site. This really makes up for the lack of an index as the entire book is searchable from the site. For me, it is the best of both worlds. I have the dead-tree version on my shelf, ready to pull down and satisfy my curiosity. I have the electronic version freely available on the web site, should I need it. The site has the added bonus of including an area for comments on the contents of the book, and there are already some helpful comments and tips there.

I think then, it is safe to say that mechanically this is a more than acceptable reference. The other important piece aside from it being usable, is the quality of the information itself. Good information is useless if one cannot get to it, and a great access system is useless if the information is no good.

The authors, O'Brien and Olsson are themselves extremely experienced in the field and I think it is safe to say they are experts in regards to CSS. The book also had two experienced "Expert Reviewers" in Natalie Downe and Roger Johansson. I couldn't find any problems with the content, and I think that it is safe to say that these four, along with others have done due diligence to provide an accurate guide to CSS.

Is this the ultimate CSS reference? I haven't read the others, and ultimate seems to imply comparison to me. So while it might not be the ultimate, I do feel comfortable recommending it to anyone who needs an extremely usable, accurate reference to CSS. I would even recommend it to a beginner who wants to learn CSS, though they should probably augment this book with something aimed at teaching CSS, not just providing a reference.

You can purchase The Ultimate CSS Reference from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Re:Google

[TheRedSeven]

Google's usefulness aside, I like having a dead-tree reference sitting on my shelf for ease of use.

However, in this case I think the best part of this whole review is the link to the SitePoint CSS Reference website [sitepoint.com].

That website is a useful tool all by itself!

I hope they didn't forget the fundamentals

[techno-vampire]

I remember, years ago, buying a book on CSS from O'Reily. It went into quite a bit of detail, although some of it was redundant. (That is, they'd show you how to do whatever the chapter was about for the same five types of page in each chapter.) However, the author neglected to include one very important, basic fact that made the book useless to me: he never showed how to get a css file into a web page. I'm sure all you web designers and webmonkeys out there are smirking, but remember, somebody had to show you how to do it too. At the time, all I knew was basic html, not even enough to use such things as frames, but I wanted to do some simple things like make sure all the pages on my private site had the same color scheme without needing to cut and paste from one to the other. Alas, the book turned out to be useless to me because the author thought that what I needed was too obvious to bother with. I hope this book is different, and that a reader who knows absolutely nothing about css will find enough here to be able to use it in their web site.

Re:CSS or Tables?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because DIV soup is so much tastier than nested table hell?

Soupiness aside, DIVs make more sense, although I hate it when people claim that DIVs are 'semantic'.

Table elements have semantic meaning, DIVs do not.

Even so. You're a mong if you do layout using tables nowadays.

Save yourself the pain and use Yahoo! UI Library

[everynerd]

They supply a framework [yahoo.com] for developing layouts that will work for all browsers while you only have to specify the basic details. The framework takes care of the rest. Stop worrying about which browser you are going to work with and get a framework that gets the groundwork written. Everything is taken care of for you. Then you can style the page how you want without worrying if users of IE 4 can view it.

Re:Save Trees Read Web

[TJamieson]

I mean really....

you can't grep a dead tree

Will this book have a single iota of information in it that I can't get from the w3c?

Info that you can't get from w3c, no. Some people (myself included) prefer the tactile feel of a book; being able to flip around, etc. Flipping around in a PDF makes me insane.

CSS is not yet about features

[scarlac]

Writing a comprehensive book on CSS is not an issue, and really... W3C has a nice homepage that is actually quite well indexed on Google.

Having a few years of experience I feel that any *practical* CSS book will focus on how a few key aspects with the web as it is today:
* What should be possible by todays accepted standards (css = 2.1)
* What is actually possible (things like text-shadow is only supported by safari (and some other more niché browsers))
* How your CSS can degrade beatifully in order to support IE 6 and still take advantage of the new features
* A couple of "watch out" to avoid common IE6/7 CSS issues such as "don't use both padding and width/height due to ie's box model", "float + margin = double margin" and other common guidelines.
* Common techniques like "sliding doors" for round corners and other nice tips to make effective use of the actual commands.

Well anyway.. Those are the things I would focus on in my book. I find writing a beginners guide or just a reference is redundant. CSS is practial - most developers usually learn it on a need-to-know basis.