By Cameron Adams, Jina Bolton, David Johnson, Steve Smith, Jonathan Snook
First Edition
March 2007
Publisher: SitePoint
Pages: 224
ISBN 10: 0-9758419-7-1 |
ISBN 13: 9780975841976
(Average of 2 Customer Reviews)
CSS-based design doesn't need to be boring. The Art & Science of CSS, brings together a talented collection of designers who will show you how to take the building blocks of your web site's design (such as headings, navigation, forms, and more) and bring them to life with fully standards-compliant CSS. This full color book helps you to design web sites that not only work well across all browsers, are easy to maintain, and are highly accessible, but are also visually stunning.
Full Description
Featured customer reviews
Applied CSS: Review of "The Art & Science of CSS", September 20 2007
Good book, and right to the point. It shows you how to use CSS to create a website that will standout by using simple and clean looking designs. You can get started right away.
Chapters include how to make rounded corners on tables and navigation tabs; the combining of images and text for visually appealing web pages, as well as styling of forms, headings, lists, and page backgrounds.
The book is laid out nicely with the sample code very easy to read and follow. Excellent format. If you want a practical guide for using CSS that zeros in and focuses on the basic parts of a web page (forms, headings, text, navigation, tables, and images), this is a good one. It shows you clearly just what you need to do.
If you want a deeper explanation on CSS elements, I would recommend "Cascading Style Sheets: A Definitive Guide".
CSS - Take Charge!, June 12 2007
This book might be the "Definitive" but I do not have anything to compare it to.
My background in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is minimal. I have taken two half day classes at our local university and I have no experience in practical usage of CSS. I am very comfortable with HTML coding but often use a WYSIWYG application to make functional no frills sites listing reference information. The book The Art & Science of CSS (published by Sitepoint) is very good for beginner to medium skill level users to pick up and work through. The title led me to believe that I was going to be exposed to practical methodology of adding well thought out design to my web site. The book did not disappoint.
In the Navigation chapter there were four ways to build navigation shown (basic-no frills horizontal, vertical, vertical with tabs, vertical with graphics). This is just one example of how the book walks the user through several levels of the sample project, each one displaying a good visual presence on its own. The book takes these presences and slowly builds off each producing even a better visual piece. Building skill upon skill is a wonderful learning process. I got the feeling of a natural progression of working on a project. You work awhile, analyze the results and see where you need to make it better, then work some more.
Several sections mentioned or displayed how different browsers will view content. A fix was provided for those occurrences where the differences were unacceptable. Other sections worked through a thought process pointing out the good and the bad about alternatives. There were several references on how to alter code that complies with screenreader usage.
A slight touch of humor was scattered throughout the book such as a “grasshopper” reference from a 70’s TV series titled Kung Fu. Yes, I’m old enough to have watched it-but I was very young. I was amused how throughout the book they kept giving me ways to stop using tables to format data and in the end showed how to make tables shine in ways tables where intended to be used. Is there anything I didn’t like about the book? No, I really can’t think of anything. It prompted you to a web site where you can download material to walk through the examples. I will need to go over certain sections of the book again so I fully grasp individual details but I will assume this is because of my lack of skill with using CSS. I highly recommend this book and feel that it will help users take control of their web site…GOODBYE TEMPLATES!
Media reviews
"The Art & Science of CSS really takes a refreshing approach to helping the web designer make their web pages striking to view, accessible to all visitors and web standards compliant. There are a lot of inspiring ideas between the covers and the implementation is clearly explained and correctly coded. I think it would make a good addition to your reference library, as it has mine!"
-- Iris Yoffa, eJounral of the Tuscson Computer Society
"The Art & Science of CSS has been written by a group of professional designers; it caters for cascading style sheets novices through to users who want to further develop their skills."
-- Major Keary, Book News
