CSS: The Definitive Guide

Michael J. Ross writes "Every Web developer knows that Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) makes it possible to separate the contents of Web pages from the styling of the elements on those pages. This in turn confers tremendous advantages, such as allowing site-wide changes of appearance to be made just once, in a single stylesheet file, rather than in all of the pages containing the affected elements. The syntax and proper usage of CSS is not as simple as implied by many HTML/CSS books, most of which fail to provide enough detail as to how CSS is applied to page elements. Web developers relying upon these books soon find themselves hitting those limits, and becoming frustrated when trying to debug Web pages. CSS: The Definitive Guide, authored by CSS expert Eric A. Meyer, aims to fill that gap." Read on for the rest of Michael's review.

CSS: The Definitive Guide
author	Eric A. Meyer
pages	536
publisher	O'Reilly Media
rating	9
reviewer	Michael J. Ross
ISBN	0596527330
summary	A comprehensive CSS reference guide.

Published by O'Reilly Media in November 2006, this title is now in its third edition. The first edition appeared in May 2000, and the second in January 2004 — with each one establishing the book as an immediate favorite among hard-core Web programmers. Each revision brought it up to date with the evolution of CSS as a standard, its support among the most popular Web browsers, and its usage within the Web development community. This latest edition covers CSS2 and CSS2.1, but does not include the CSS3 modules, including those that have reached Candidate Recommendation status, because their implementation is largely incomplete among most of the browsers.

Web veteran Eric Meyer presents the book's material in a methodical manner, starting with an overview of CSS's purpose and advantages, and quickly moving into the details of the technology: selectors, structure, inheritance, values, units, fonts, text properties, visual formatting, padding, borders, margins, colors, backgrounds, floating, positioning, tables, lists, and generated content (e.g., bullets of unordered lists). The last two chapters address user interface styles (system fonts and colors, cursors, and outlines) and non-screen media (such as paged and aural content). The book's 536 pages are organized into a total of 14 chapters and three appendices. The first appendix is a complete CSS property reference, spanning more than 40 pages, with visual, page, and aural properties grouped separately. For each property, Meyer explains its purpose, its valid values, the initial value, what elements it applies to, whether it is inherited, its computed value, and additional notes (if any). The second appendix is a reference for the selectors, pseudo classes, and pseudo elements. The third and final appendix is much shorter than the first two, but no less interesting, as it discusses a sample HTML 4 stylesheet, which is presented in the CSS2.1 specification as the recommended style sheet for developers to use.

As with all of their other titles, O'Reilly Media offers a Web page devoted to this book, where visitors will find links to online versions of the book cover, table of contents, index, registration form, reader reviews, and errata (of which there are none, as of this writing). In addition, the page has offers to receive a volume discount, and to read the book online as part of O'Reilly's Safari service.

Anyone who is considering purchasing this book might initially be concerned by the dearth of feedback on the Web sites of the publisher and the major online booksellers — in the form of few reader comments, and no reported errata. The prospective reader may wrongly conclude that this indicates a lack of interest in the book, and thus it must be unpopular — probably for good reason. But just the opposite is true, as demonstrated by the book's sales rank on Amazon.com alone: #4631, as of this writing. Unlike far too many of the other HTML/CSS books available, this one does not engender scathing reviews by customers angry with the books' shoddy writing and sloppy mistakes. Rather, Meyer's contribution is the type of solid reference book that the discerning Web developer will quietly place on their desk or bookshelf, within easy and frequent reach — possibly displacing a dog-eared first or second edition of the same title. Furthermore, the absence of errata should suggest that most if not all kinks have been worked out of the book, and not that the book is failing to receive careful readings.

CSS: The Definitive Guide benefits not just from its multiple revisions, but also from Eric Meyer's clear and complete writing style. Unlike his more advanced books, this one is far more approachable, making it possible for the reader to easily jump into the midst of any topic and quickly pick up the thread — as is essential for any technical reference work. The theoretical discussions and the sample code demonstrate his abundant experience in using CSS in the real world, discovering or verifying its idiosyncrasies, and pushing it to its limits. Most of the critical visual and positioning topics are well illustrated with diagrams and sample output, few of which are weakened by the lack of color in the grayscale figures. Last and certainly not least, readers should be pleased that the book's material has been updated for Internet Explorer 7, which promises to fix many inexcusable problems in earlier versions of the browser.

Rarely does one come across a programming book that has no significant flaws, and will likely become a favorite resource for developers everywhere. CSS: The Definitive Guide is a comprehensive, well-written, and welcome addition to the library of any Web developer who wishes to understand and utilize CSS better.

Michael J. Ross is a Web consultant, freelance writer, and the editor of PristinePlanet.com's free newsletter. He can be reached at www.ross.ws, hosted by SiteGround.

---

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

My experience

This is a great book, but my binding cracked after 2 weeks. Worth buying anyway though.

Re:My experience

This is a great book, but my binding cracked after 2 weeks.

This is why I prefer hardbound CSS books, where you can make changes to the book's binding independently of its content.

A wonderful book

I purchased the previous version, and it was truly a clear and concise introduction and mastery of CSS. Mastery in the sense of understanding how CSS works, not in mastery of CSS Cookbook type "fixes". It was much better to learn the fundamentals of CSS before trying to understand why and how the hacks work the way they do. I still keep and use the book as a reference at my desk at work.

designer not developer

Why don't people understand the difference between a designer and a developer?

Re:designer not developer

Why don't people understand the difference between a designer and a developer?

The web makes that distinction hazier and hazier. Many of us end up doing both in spite of the fact that we're not really suited to it, unfortunately. Of course, the software lets us get decent results easier and easier all the time, so that helps.

But even just talking about CSS, is doing CSS really just design? With all the stupid CSS tricks you have to play, it seems to me more like cross-platform programming than anything else.

I realize that CSS is not a programming language. More's the pity; if it were a little more like a language then a lot of things that are very hard to do in CSS and require dynamic styles (or at least assignation of styles) to do properly would be very easy. For example, I should be able to say that an element is n% minus the width of another element... But since I can't I have to figure out how many units (typ. pixels) are in n%, then figure out how many units wide the other element is, and then set the width of the element I was trying to size accordingly. And if the element I'm trying to fit in next to is sized in ems instead of px, I have to recalculate this data and resize elements every time the font size is changed.

My question

It has been updated to account for IE7's ideosyncracies, but does it also cover the other browsers well? Every time I've started really using CSS, I 've gotten frustrated by the way each browser decided to support a different subset of CSS so I had to sit there and try everything before figuring out what non-IE-on-Windows browsers would make of the page. Probably the major browsers support much more of the CSS spec, but I was burned so bad last time I haven't wanted to touch it with a ten foot pole in several years.

Re:My question

Css browser support [webdevout.net]. Pretty good guide. If you design for FF or Opera and don't use any hairy CSS, it should look pretty good in IE7 (assuming you're using a decent DOCTYPE) and can be tamed in IE6 with a few tweaks to fix things like the broken box model and such.

Interesting thing I noticed when scrolling through the guide linked above - the level of css support between IE6 and IE7 isn't all that different (maybe a handful of new items supported). So, IE7 was mainly a bugfix release. Five years and they finally fixed the CSS engine. Way to go MS.

If you can't see the sarcasm dripping from above, check your glasses.

Good Book. Bad Index.

The book is, as the OP states, excellent.

The problem lies with its index. Actually using the book is very difficult because the Index is so non-inclusive of the subjects within the book.

Worth getting, but be prepared to flip through it a whole lot more than you would if the Index was well written.

My 2 cents.

Simplify CSS development

Want to simplify CSS development? Just make IE disappear. Checking that the CSS works in IE is taking lot of time and is the most frustrating not to mention that you have nothing like Web Developer or FireBug. What to loose your neurons, make your CSS work in IE, hack after hack. bGR@!#!@#! len [www.len.ro]

What does this book offer...

... that all the free online resources offer? Is it merely organized data? Is it the examples? I find all of that readily available for many web technologies and even more so for PHP and CSS. Numerous sites exist that cover everything in several ways too. Is this book simply a consolidation of information that is otherwise free via a google search?

Re:What does this book offer...

What does this book offer... ... that all the free online resources [do not] offer?

Just one thing: Eric Meyer's insights into the theory and practice of CSS. A web developer reading one of Meyer's books is sort of like an aspiring novelist reading Steven King's book On Writing.

IE is the roadblock

CSS is great in theory and should make sites easier to maintain, but in my experience all this advantage is lost when hacking to get IE to support it. I seem to have to support IE OR the rest of the world's web browsers, but I can't seem to get certain pages to support both. I've had to revert back to HTML tables for my page layouts, and I'll be sticking with that until a more CSS-friendly IE becomes more widespread. I just spend a bit of time familiarising myself with CSS and using it for text styling and some positioning within my tables. I'm sure in a year or two it'll become feasible to use CSS exclusively, and I'm quite looking forward to it.

Re:IE is the roadblock

To everybody posting the obligatory "IE Sucks at CSS", while I agree with the sentiment, my own IE experiences got much less painful (and this goes for Firefox too) when I learned how the browsers tell between "quirks mode" (where rendering with CSS is a true crapshoot) and "standards compliance mode" (where rendering with CSS is... somewhat less of a crapshoot).

If your DOCTYPE tag at the start of your HTML starts with something like:
[!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
                        "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"] (in angle brackets, thanks Slashdot!)

Then IE/FF will render it in a fairly similar way. If you don't include the URI of the DOCTYPE ("http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd", above) then you're stuck in quirks mode hell.

That said, IE still sucks at CSS.

Not the only positive of CSS.

Every Web developer knows that Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) makes it possible to separate the contents of Web pages from the styling of the elements on those pages.
Or in the case of MySpace, CSS allows a user to make a website with no content look better by overdosing on the style.

Might be worthwile

I haven't read the book, but given the fact that creating a simple three column layout that works on every browser and looks good too is far from trivial, one can conclude two things:

• Something's wrong with CSS
  
  
• This book may be worth buying

Why?!?

Why would anyone write a book about Counter Strike: Source? God, I hate that game!!

Remember folks...

Tables Are Good.

Is CSS a Failure? Use wysiwyg web editors?

If you need a 536 page book to "Master" such a trivial part of web development as page and text formatting then CSS is a failure. Are there any wysiwyg "Html editors" that produce portable CSS? If so, then the book is obsolete.

As any Word(tm) user knows, page layout and text formatting should be done Visually. I don't code in assembler any more. And I shouldn't have to write text-formatting codes. Troff was obsolete years ago! CSS is just Troff on steroids.

CSS is such a pain in the butt we should all go back to using tables. I really think it's easier.

Re:Is CSS a Failure? Use wysiwyg web editors?

As any Word(tm) user knows, page layout and text formatting should be done Visually.

What any Word(tm) user with any experience knows, is page layout and text formatting should be done in anything other than fricking Word, except you have to send in a fricking Word file and exporting Word from any other applications almost works. At least OpenOffice is annoying and buggy for free.

Bearing in mind the web was invented by a bunch of physicists its a wonder that it uses HTML and not LaTeX Now, that would be fun: a default page design reflecting the acme of the typographers art (LaTeX output is really beautiful) and a vertical learning curve if you wanted to change that style.

ummm

am I the only one that thought this was another countrstrike guide having read the title. LOL

ProgrammingBooks.org

I hate to shill my own stuff, but I recently created a site for ranking programming books based on category(language, api, etc) that I think most developers will find very useful. Basically programmers rank their top 5 books for each category. It's very simple, and hopefully useful. It's in a pain finding quality programming books. The only real resource is browsing/searching through amazon, which can be a real pain.

http://www.programmingbooks.org/ [programmingbooks.org]

For example, here are the top ranked CSS books: http://www.programmingbooks.org/CSS [programmingbooks.org] (not many users have ranked css books)

Ohhhh JOY Yet Another Mystery Novel (YAMN)

Yeah you heard it here 1st. A new acronym, YAMN. CSS is becomming even more of a joke then it already is. And the worst part is that is a cruel joke.

As many have said in this string of posts, without the use of tables, it is no longer a job for the general web creator to create a three column lay out, without being a complete CSS guru and even for them it gives them headaches.

In my estimation, what the designers of CSS have managed to do is crush the life out of the promise that once was the a usable, if slightly clumsy, way to present information.

As an example. Using un-ordered lists to create menus. Its a complete and total hack, and I mean to use the word hack in the most derogitory manner possible. Instead of comming up with a menu framework that was designed from the ground up to be menus they used this stupid hack and think they are so cool. News for you, your not cool, your not smart nor are you clever.

There are elements of CSS that are quite functional and workable, but for the most part its just a cludge and a bad one at that. Lets take for example something that could make all of our lives easier, the basic ability to have include files. All you CSS lovers hate frames and you hate tables. Well with frames I can make ONE file contain the entire drop down menu section. I create it in one file and ONLY one file. I edit it in ONE file and ONE file only. So while you geniouses are comming up with HTML, DHTML, XHTML, CSS1, CSS2, etc. ad nausium, you cant seem to fit that simple part in there. Every freeking page has to have the complete menuing system in it and if anything has to be changed in it, like CONTENT someone has to go and edit 1 to n freeking html files, sorry, but for that you guys just plain SUCK.

Now I just know someone will think in regard to that last bit, that it should just be in a database! Well sure as shootin! Except why on fucking earth does a 10 page web site need to have a complete CRM system behind it? Why should it even have a database! Then you will say, but it is only 10 pages, you should write a VI or better yet an EMACS macro to handle that. Better yet anyone who would suggest that should get rectaly examined by the phalus of a donky. UL's twisted into menu's are not trivial and can be broken quite easily. Develop a MENU interface if you are determiend to turn something loosley associated with desktop publishing into a full on interactive bit of software.

The bottom line is this, if you want people to really embrace CSS then FIX IT. Get the venders to fix the browsers and if they wont fix it, then stop twisting CSS all over itself to accomodate them and just let it those browsers fail and the market will fix it.

MOD PARENT DOWN. Referral spammer

If you examine the link in the parent's post, it shows that he's using a referral code, kaleidojewel1-20. Scumbag.

Next time,

Next time, use a URL proxy service, like the article submitter did for the link to their hosting company.

Re:For those who don't know about referral spammin

point 3: the referral doesn't affect the price.

If I buy the book through that link, I'll save $6.30. How is that bad? The fact that someone else makes a some money in the process doesn't adversely affect me (in fact it save me money).

Re:Eric Meyer, the HTML-TABLE killer!!

It's funny that you should blame Meyer for suggesting that the technology be used the way it was intended to be used, rather than blaming MS for creating a browser with poor CSS support which forces developers to, as you say, spend time debugging code across browsers. Incidentally, try adding a border, margin and padding to a fixed-width table and see how well that displays cross-browser...