Home / DHTML & CSS / O'Reilly "CSS cookbook" review


 

Partners
Save big on iPage's shared and Wordpress hosting with our March coupons!
iPage March coupons
Save big on iPage's shared and Wordpress hosting with our March coupons!
iPage March coupons
Facebook Fan Page


O'Reilly "CSS Cookbook" review
Book review by JavaScriptKit.com | Publisher: O'Reilly, Christopher Schmitt, 1st edition (August, 2004)

I like to compare learning CSS with grasping the Matrix (Keano Reeves)- you have to see it to get it. O'Reilly's "CSS Cookbook (1st edition, August 2004) is just one the numerous CSS books that follow this style of teaching, by showing you a series of common CSS examples. I spent a week reading through the entire book, and here's my review on it.

"CSS cookbook" is a relatively thin book at 270 pages, and broken up into 10 Chapters, each containing a series of recipes. The chapters are:

1. Web Typography
      1.1 Specifying Fonts and Inheritance
      1.2 Specifying Font Measurements and Sizes
      1.3 Enforcing Font Sizes
      1.4 Setting a Simple Initial Cap
      1.5 Setting a Larger, Centered Initial Cap
      1.6 Setting an Initial Cap with Decoration (Imagery)
      1.7 Creating a Heading with Stylized Text
      1.8 Creating a Heading with Stylized Text and Borders
      1.9 Stylizing a Heading with Text and an Image
      1.10 Creating a Pull Quote with HTML Text
      1.11 Creating a Pull Quote with Borders
      1.12 Creating a Pull Quote with Images
      1.13 Setting the Indent in the First Line of a Paragraph
      1.14 Setting the Indent of Entire Paragraphs
      1.15 Setting Text to Be Justified
      1.16 Styling the First Line of a Paragraph
      1.17 Styling the First Line of a Paragraph with an Image
      1.18 Creating a Highlighted Text Effect
      1.19 Changing Line Spacing

2. Page Elements
      2.1 Eliminating Page Margins
      2.2 Coloring the Scrollbar
      2.3 Centering Elements on a Web Page
      2.4 Setting a Background Image
      2.5 Creating a Line of Background Images
      2.6 Placing a Background Image
      2.7 Fixing the Background Image
      2.8 Placing a Page Border
      2.9 Customizing a Horizontal Rule
      2.10 Example Design: Setting Up a Dynamic Splash Page

3. Links and Navigation
      3.1 Removing Underlines from Links
      3.2 Setting Text to Blink
      3.3 Setting Style Decorations Other Than Underlines
      3.4 Changing Cursors
      3.5 Creating Rollovers Without JavaScript
      3.6 Creating Nongraphical Menus with Rollovers
      3.7 Creating Collapsible Menus
      3.8 Building Horizontal Menus
      3.9 Creating Breadcrumb Navigation
      3.10 Creating Image-Based Rollovers
      3.11 Designing a Dynamic Visual Menu
      3.12 Creating Contextual Menus

4. Lists
      4.1 Changing the Format of a List
      4.2 Writing Cross-Browser Indentation in Lists
      4.3 Creating Custom Text Markers for Lists
      4.4 Creating Custom Image Markers for Lists
      4.5 Creating Inline Lists
      4.6 Making Hanging Indents in a List
      4.7 Moving the Marker Inside the List

5. Forms
      5.1 Setting Styles for Input Elements
      5.2 Setting Styles for textarea Elements
      5.3 Setting Styles for Select and Option Elements
      5.4 Creating Form Buttons
      5.5 Setting Up a Submit-Once-Only Button
      5.6 Designing a Web Form Without Tables
      5.7 Sample Design: A Login Form
      5.8 Sample Design: A Registration Form

6. Tables
      6.1 Setting the Cell Spacing
      6.2 Setting the Borders and Cell Padding
      6.3 Setting the Styles Within Table Cells
      6.4 Removing Gaps from Table Cells with Images
      6.5 Setting Styles for Table Header Elements
      6.6 Sample Design: An Elegant Calendar

7. Page Layouts
      7.1 Developing Hybrid Layouts Using HTML Tables and CSS
      7.2 Building a One-Column Layout
      7.3 Building a Two-Column Layout
      7.4 Building a Two-Column Layout with Fixed-Width Columns
      7.5 Creating a Flexible Multicolumn Layout with Floats
      7.6 Creating a Fixed-Width Multicolumn Layout with Floats
      7.7 Creating a Flexible Multicolumn Layout with Positioning
      7.8 Creating a Fixed-Width Multicolumn Layout with Positioning
      7.9 Designing an Asymmetric Layout

8. Print
      8.1 Creating a Printer-Friendly Page
      8.2 Making a Web Form Print-Ready
      8.3 Inserting URLs After Links
      8.4 Sample Design: A Printer-Friendly Page with CSS

9. Hacks and Workarounds
      9.1 Hiding Certain Styles from Netscape Navigator 4.x
      9.2 Delivering Alternative Values to Internet Explorer 5.x for Windows
      9.3 Removing Web Page Flicker in Internet Explorer 5.x for Windows
      9.4 Keeping Background Images Stationary in Internet Explorer 6 for Windows
      9.5 Keeping CSS Rules from Internet Explorer 5 for Macintosh

10. Designing with CSS
      10.1 Enlarging Text Excessively
      10.2 Creating Unexpected Incongruity
      10.3 Combining Unlike Elements to Create Contrast
      10.4 Leading the Eye with Contrast
      10.5 Building a Panoramic Image Presentation
      10.6 Combining Different Image Formats
      10.7 Making Word Balloons
      10.8 Emphasizing a Quotation
      10.9 Placing a Drop Shadow Behind an Image
 

By looking at the table of contents, you can see that the book tries to cover most of the beginner to intermediate CSS questions typically raised. The book does a great job of inserting screenshots whenever a recipe benefits from one. The examples are compact and to the point, unlike many CSS books that use every opportunity to pad examples with a lot of redundant HTML code to lengthen the book. You can really appreciate the author's concise writing style.

Now, the book's compact recipes also turn out to be its shortcoming in my opinion for intermediate to seasoned CSS coders looking to pick up some innovative or advanced CSS techniques. About 1/3 of the recipes essentially recite the major CSS properties such as "background-image", "font" etc and explaining them via an example. For people just learning CSS, these recipes certainly carry just as much merit as the more advanced ones, so it really depends on where you currently are in your CSS knowledge. However, for intermediate/ advanced CSS coders, this book will serve more as a reminder and inspiration of classic CSS techniques than teach you anything new. Chapter 7 on "Page Layout" is a little lacking in my opinion, which only discusses on a rather high level the two typical ways to create tableless layouts using CSS. The book does contain recipes on both using margins and absolute positioning to accomplish a tableless layout, though much was left out on the intricacies of these techniques that make them truly usable, such as techniques to create a stable layout regardless of browser size or type, columns that are equal in height regardless of the content contained inside, and absolute positioning layouts that won't overlap content that's added outside of it etc. The recipes are relatively skeleton, which again, will appeal to beginner CSS coders looking to grasp the fundamentals of the techniques.

I found Chapters 3 (Links and Navigation) and 8 (Print) engaging, even for someone who is already familar with CSS as a whole. The recipies are well thought out and in some cases unorthodox, inpiring you to come up with unique ideas of your own.

Overall, this is a good companion book for CSS coders, and especially for people in the process of learning the fundamentals of CSS, an excellent 2nd book after your first. I'll stop short of saying it's essential, however, unlike O'Reilly's JavaScript & DHTML Cookbook.

O'Reilly CSS Cookbook (from Amazon)
-Rating: 7.5/10

http://www.javascriptkit.com
Copyright © 1997-2005 JavaScript Kit. NO PART may be reproduced without author's permission.