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Beginning CSS Development From Novice to Professional A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, never more true than when applied to website development. Witness the vast numbers of sites that are hanging on by their fingernails, using tables for layout and mixing presentational markup and content. And while such sites might look and function perfectly adequately for the casual user, they mask more serious problems in the soft white underbelly of the HTML: visually impaired visitors who rely on screenreaders might be presented with gibberish; delivering content to other platforms, such as mobile phones, might be prohibitive, and further web development deemed too complex because the code is frankly a mess.
For all the criticism levelled at so called Web 2.0 development, the one thing it has generally got right is the code, with an adherence to standards and semantic mark-up. What this means in practice is establishing a way of working that separates a site's content from the presentational code used to make it look like how the designer intended, using HTML and stylesheets that are modern, clean and fully validating.
If you've dabbled with stylesheets, perhaps to style rollovers or other low-level CSS quick fixes, but things like Divs, floats, and the IE Box hack are the stuff of mystery and confusion, then Simon Collison’s Beginning CSS Development From Novice to Professional is the book for you. With a matey, have-a-nice-cup-of-tea style of delivery, Colly manages to unlock the power of Cascading Style Sheets in a way that is surprisingly clear and digestible.
Simon Collison is the lead developer at Erskine, a company he recently joined following a long stint at Agenzia and has over five years experience building websites, which in internet terms is half a lifetime. He's built sites for record labels such as Universal and Poptones, recording artists like The Libertines and The Beta Band and visual artists Jon Burgerman and Black Convoy. He runs a personal blog called Collylogic, which full of hot tips and web-related trivia.
If you've never coded a website before, then you'd be better off looking elsewhere, because Colly assumes a basic knowledge of HTML, and at least the ability to create a basic XHTML page. If this describes you, then Beginning CSS Development will become your best friend and constant companion.
The book starts off with the basic concepts of CSS, extolling the virtues of external stylesheets, and the clear pros-and-cons approach sets the template for the rest of the book. Colly spends a good deal of time carefully explaining why being organised is the key to success, and provides examples of logically laid-out stylesheets, with clear commenting to help explain to others (and yourself when you return to a job after a couple of months) exactly what you've done.
From there the book tackles IDs, Classes, Divs, Text, Lists, Links, Forms and Layouts in logical chunks. Colly wraps things up with a case study that uses all the techniques discussed to create a fully functioning website. Beginning CSS Development has plenty of diagrams, screenshots and code examples to ensure the reader has a firm grasp of what's going on, but it's really Colly’s clear text and deceptively casual way of conveying complex theories in way that makes you smack your head and cry Eureka!
Before you know it, the book has explained the basic principles of modern, semantic CSS, and eased you into a more progressive world of advanced layout. Hacks are avoided in favour of doing things properly, except where absolutely necessary (I'm looking at you, Internet Explorer).
Some guides and how-to books can be a little too techy and detached, but Beginning CSS Development has a winning combination of being authoritative, thorough and friendly. It's a joy to read, easy to digest and best of all, your websites and understanding of CSS are going to improve as a result.
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