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The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks
by Rachel Andrew

Publisher: Sitepoint (Oreilly & Associates Inc) 

ISBN: 0-9579218-8-8
Format: Paperback, 400pp
CD: NO

The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks was not written for web designer and developers with NO knowledge of CSS. While the starting chapter provides some basic tutorial on Cascading Stlye Sheets, if your CSS knowledge is really poor, you should first grab a book that explains the workings of CSS in more details. This, of course, does not mean that you should not take a look at what this book has to offer - and, to be honest, there's much.

On more than 400 pages, the author (Rachel Andrew, professional web designer) provides enough valuable tips and trick for any occasion. Split into 8 categories, starting from "Text styling and other basics", "Css and images", to more advance "Tabular data" and "Browser specific CSS", "101 Essential Tips" provides more than the title suggests. The book provides best-practice coding styles and CSS 2.1 compliant code to ensure that your web pages are easy to maintain and will continue to work well into the future.

As you would expect from this (reference) kind of book, every example starts with a question, like: "How do I make a horizontal menu using CSS and links". I really loved this approach: it does not force you to read the book from cover to cover. It lets you quickly locate the answer to the particular CSS problem - open the book, look in the TOC, locate your task and find the best solution inside the book. Each practical solution starts with a brief explanation of the "problem". The author has nicely included screen shots of the solution as well as the CSS code needed to solve the problem. Note: all the screen shots are in black-and-white, I guess it would be even more reader-friendly if those images were in full color. After all, if an example explains changing colors when the mouse hovers over an HTML element, it would be great if the screen shot provided was in full color.

All the examples of CSS design are focused on practical usage. As you work through the book, you'll note the file names above every code listing. Those links refer to downloadable archive (located on the Publisher web site) that contains all the finished examples presented in the book.

Finally, the CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks is not only about quick CSS code solutions to pressing problems. The discussion that accompanies each tip enables you to customize your formatting and explains why and how to adopt the technique to other situations and, if needed, to other browsers.

"Warning": more technical look...
Most of the examples use the "ID selector" to apply a CSS style to a particular HTML element/tag (by its ID attribute). While this is acceptable in static web pages, those web developers producing dynamic web sites will have to adopt every such solution. In ASP.NET, the ID of a particular HTML element is not "fixed", in most cases.

Note 1: if you buy this book, you'll receive a free CSS poster (large format, includes all the most commonly used CSS properties). The bonus CSS Reference poster is only available for those purchasing directly through Sitepoint's Website.
Note2: You can download 4 free sample chapters from the book, before you decide on purchase.