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CSS Anthology 101 Essential Tips
review by Arien Malec, October 2005
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| While one should never judge a book by its cover, one should, for technical books at least, be able to judge by its title. The CSS Anthology fails this basic test: it is neither an "Anthology" (that term is properly reserved for collections of previously published texts), nor, as the subtitle suggests, a book of advanced "tips, tricks and hacks" (the subtitle does read "essential," but the lure of "tricks and hacks" more than suggests an advanced book.) It is, rather, a CSS cookbook. The obvious title, "The CSS Cookbook," was taken, but there were many other alternatives that would have better communicated the intent of this book. As a random example, "101 CSS Solutions: A Problem-Centered Guide" would have worked quite well. Does this matter? Both in online, and in the bookstore, the title is a major key to what the book is about. Publishing technical books with misleading titles is a sin: the reader who makes purchasing decisions on the basis, at least partially, of the title deserves to get what is advertised. |
| That major issue aside, The CSS Anthology functions reasonably well as a CSS cookbook. In normal cookbook fashion, the absolute basics of CSS are dealt with first, including ordinary CSS selectors, and the style and link tags. Subsequent chapters cover text styling, images, anchors and lists, tables and forms. The last chapters discuss somewhat advanced topics, including cross browser support, positioning, and techniques supported by only subsets of browsers. Each topic is discussed in the context of concrete problems, which are used to introduce the relevant CSS vocabularies to solve the problem. The CSS techniques introduced are solid, and the practices used are strong. The focus of the book seems to be the designer who needs to style static html pages entirely under her control—the needs of the programmer or designer who need to specify the structure of dynamic content in order to create hooks for CSS styling are mostly not covered. |
| The coverage of list, table and form styling is the strongest part of the book. The techniques presented are close to state of the art, are presented clearly, and are quite useful. I especially liked the section on using table styling to create a calendar; that approach will go in my toolkit. The coverage of positioning, by contrast, barely scratches the surface, concentrating mainly on positioning in the context of overall static page layout. CSS positioning is an area where a cookbook approach does not work as well; a solid understanding of the box model is hard to get bottom-up, without understanding the underlying theory. The chapter on browser support is helpful in documenting some browser quirks; the chapter on advanced features barely scratches the surface on the aspects of CSS that are not currently supported by IE6. |
| The CSS Anthology will be a useful book for the novice to intermediate CSS practitioner, who learns mostly by seeing and doing. Reading and working through the lessons will impart a solid understanding of how to construct most static page layouts, and a good understanding of enough of CSS to pick up and understand more advanced uses. It would be best paired with a book explaining the theory of CSS, such as one of Eric Meyer's. Except for the major issue of the misleading title, The CSS Anthology is a well-written learn-by-doing introduction to the core of CSS. |