The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, by Rachel Andrew

The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks, 3rd Edition, which is the full title of the current version of the book, is a good book on CSS. However, I bought it after having seen the ad for it on sitepoint’s site. I have to say I expected it to be a little more advanced than it turned out to be, and a little bit more a jour as well. The good folks at sitepoint are sometimes a little too good and to clever in their marketing, and create impressions that don’t usually meet the expectations. Almost to the point where I now finally have learned to divide what they write by pi and will most likely keep a larger distance to their products. Sitepoint should perhaps ask what they want as a publisher: Satisfied customers that re-purchase or sales that give customer dissatisfaction.

Oh well, on to the book itself. The book is quite good and covers CSS broadly without giving much in-depth coverage and very few references. Rachel Andrew provides a large number of good, standards compliant examples of how to use CSS in a set of different situations. It is a book that I would think of as very useful for people with beginning to intermediate CSS-skills.

The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks is a practical introduction and guide. The author shows how to use CSS for all the common purposes: for styling text, formatting headings and images, for styling forms and for user interfaces and navigation.

The book has a preface, nine chapters, and an index. Chapter 1 is an introduction to CSS showing why it is replacing HTML table and layout formatting, and the basic concepts of CSS. The other chapters have a “problem/solution” format dealing with various design issues, and solutions to those issues using CSS. There is also quite a bit of material about browser-compatibility issues, but some of this is quickly getting old as new version have been launched and/or are in the process of being launched.

The book is mostly useful as a practical guide. It is not very good as a reference book. Nor is it very up to date as far as the emerging CSS3 standards are concerned. This disappointed me a little, as most people creating web pages today or in the near future will want to use these new techniques instead of the older and often more complicated ones.

I recommend The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks primarily for people wanting to learn CSS that prefers to do it by solving practical problems one by one as they encounter them.

Links to books by Rachel Andrew at amazon US and Amazon UK.

Tagged as: book review, CSS, Rachel Andrew, Web design