Stylin' With CSS: A Designer's Guide

by Charles Wyke-Smith

After introducing readers to CSS, a practical handbook explains how to style text, create style sheets, position content, create links, design navigation, and style forms, lists, and tables, to enable any level designer to start quickly creating sites with CSS. Original. (All users)

Genres: Website Design, Design, Programming, Reference, Nonfiction, Technical, Technology

275 pages, Paperback

First published May 6, 2005

About the author

Charles Wyke-Smith has been involved in media production for his entire career. In the mid-80s, he co-founded PRINTZ Electronic Design, an early, all-computerized design studio in San Francisco. He has worked in management and consulting roles at Wells Fargo, ESPN Videogames, and Benefitfocus, where he was Director of User Experience. In 2009, he co-founded PeopleMatter, an HR platform for the services industries. He is currently CEO of a new startup, Bublish, a book discovery platform.
Charles is a performing musician and author of several Web development books, including Stylin’ with CSS, Codin’ for the Web, Scriptin’ with AJAX, and Visual Stylin’ with CSS3. He lives in Charleston, South Carolina with his wife and two daughters.

Reviews

[Marek Pawlowski · Rating 3 out of 5]

Naprawdę niezły podręcznik na temat CSS. Znajduje się tutaj wiele kluczowych informacji, które warto poznać na początku. Nie jest to pozycja niezwykła, niemniej jednak jest ona warta zakupu. Jest to zasadniczo pierwsza książka o CSS, jaką przeczytałem, dlatego też trochę trudno ocenić mi jej jakość, porównując ją do czegokolwiek innego. Oprawa graficzna mogłaby być ciut lepsza. No i książka pomimo wielu aktualizacji ma już swoje lata, czego trudno nie zauważyć.

This is a really nice references book about the CSS where we can find a lot of key information that are good to know at the beginning. This is not an amazing piece of work, nevertheless it’s worth to buy. This is the first book about CSS that I have ever read, that’s why it’s quite difficult to compare it to anything else. Its graphic design could be better. And this book (despite actualizations) is quite old and that’s hard not to notice.

[Darrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first css book and it was pretty good. I probably can't be much of a judge seeing as this is my first but I feel like I learned a lot.

[Darrell Ulm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty good CSS design book. Good place to start.

[Matt Ward · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the few reference books that I have actually sat down and read cover to cover, and it was completely worth it. For years, I had been struggling with using style sheets. I had learned HTML in a sort of mashed up, thrown-to-the-fire, just-do-it sort of way, but when I tried to do the same thing with CSS, well I failed to grasp the technology's simple beauty and produced frighteningly horrible style sheets.

Finally, I decided that enough was enough and that I had to get this CSS thing sorted out. I went to the book store, selected this book from a myriad of others, on account of its simplicity and clean layout. I then brought it home and started reading.

And the light came on. Over the course of just a few chapters, Wyke-Smith outlined the basic concept of CSS, demonstrated its wide range of uses and helped me establish a firm conceptual foundation, which has allowed me to implement complex style sheets easily and (relatively) painlessly.

If you are just learning CSS, I highly recommend this book.

[Ellie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best reference guide to learning CSS I've read so far. Goes beyond basic principles into much more complex design techniques and mathematical coding structures such as inheritance and pseudo-classes. Also has a well-organized and extensive CSS properties chart in the appendix, which is perfect for quick reference.

I still don't think I'd be able to learn CSS from the ground up just with this book alone, but that could just be me (I don't really learn from written material). For me, it's a perfect guide to use with hands-on projects and material. For someone with an established background in computer languages, you probably could learn CSS with this book alone.

Highly recommended for anyone starting out in the field. I'd say it's intermediate-level material.

[Mari · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aha, this book is just what I needed. It's taught me what I've wanted to know to make webpages that are cool looking but also web standards compliant--meaning that I can make webpages that are readable across many platforms, and by people using screenreaders, or text-only interfaces. Nice! It means learning how to structure content cleanly and then applying the CSS to make it look rad, like I want.

[Balaji Dutt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have occassionally meddled with the CSS on my blog, but a recent push to redesign the blog and launch my own site got me interested in learning more. Stylin' with CSS was heavily recommended and I have to say I'm not disappointed. The step by step examples are very helpful, especially in the early chapters when going through the core concepts. Definitely a must-read if you are getting into CSS.

[Amy Bailey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an incredibly helpful resource for a subject that is extremely complicated. I wish I'd had this book when I first started studying web development, because I would have had several much-needed epiphanies. I have a feeling I'll be referencing this book many times as I struggle through my Intermediate Web Development class.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good introduction to CSS. The examples in the early chapters are easy to follow and very informative. Chapters 7 & 8 are a little harder to follow and the code from the website is a little harder to match with the examples in the book. It is well worth reading if you are interested in learning CSS.

[Sara S. · Rating 2 out of 5]

For beginners, and too talky to serve as a practical reference book.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gotta read some nerd shit for work. Excellent guide to CSS. It gets you up and running in no time.

[Laura]

I am wandering around in this book. So far, quite good.

[Leo Polovets · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sections on CSS internals (box model, etc) were quite good, but I wish there were more of them. Also, examples could have been presented more compactly.

[Terri · Rating 3 out of 5]

Trying to teach myself some CSS. Not easy, but this book has given me some good tips.

[Julia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read for a class.

[Frankie Wolf · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great, really accessible guide to the CSS3 update.