The 5 best books to get on learning CSS
By Erna Mahyuni
If you own and maintain your own blog or website, there’s no getting around learning CSS. Nothing quite beats a good reference book on the subject so here’s 5 top picks.
1. Cascading Stylesheets:Designing for the Web by the co-creators of CSS themselves: Hakon Wium Lie and Bert Bos. This is pretty much the definitive guide to cascading stylesheets and lists down every single property, making this the tome you’d want to refer to as you’re coding CSS.
Besides the exhaustive reference sheets, the book also has downloadable examples for you to muck with at home. Perfect for those who want the entire CSS specification in print form.
2. Eric Meyer on CSS by, yes, Eric Meyer. Eric Meyer’s pretty much the man who’s most associated with the standard and has written books on the subject for O’Reilly among others. But of all the tomes he’s written, this is pretty much the one to get if you’re a Meyer fan.
Fair warning – it’s not a book for beginners and it’s not learning-curve friendly. But if you’re a designer who wants to learn the intricacies of CSS, discover neat tricks you wouldn’t have thought of yourself then this is the book to get. It’s a book of examples which take you through different website scenarios – perfect for those itching for a more hands-on approach.
3. More Eric Meyer on CSS. If you couldn’t get enough of Meyer in the last book, then you’d enjoy this tome featuring 10 more CSS projects.
4. The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web (Voices That Matter) by Dave Shea and Molly E. Holzschlag. A book that will sell on the strength of its website alone, both the site and the book have stunning examples of how flexible CSS is. The book to get for web designers who want a bit more emphasis on aesthetics.
5. CSS:The Missing Manual by David Sawyer McDarland. This is my personal favourite of all five books with its witty writing and content suited to beginner and intermediate level users. The links to various resources are also helpful and it’s a book for those easily scared off by jargon, due to its layman-friendly presentation.
If you’re too cheap to go out and buy a book, here are some free CSS resources online for you to visit:
The original CSS specifications at www.w3c.org
Webmonkey’s free and fun Web tutorials that take you from CSS to php to even creating a personal website on the fly.
WesternCiv’s complete CSS guide.
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