Rating: 
Summary: Excellent work done here!
Review: As an Information Archietct, I need a sort of a "css rule book" as I design online business infrastructures. This book helps me make educated design decisions, create sample case scenarios and present ideas, fast and easy. Definitely worth it.
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Summary: Great Book -- Plenty of Info About How to Use CSS Now
Review: Boy, this thing is big! If you are interested in using CSS on your Web site, this is a really good guide as to what code you can use now with the current browser standards. The info relating to the Mozilla browser (which will become Netscape Navigator 6.0) is handy as well.The one thing I like about this book over the O'Reilly book on the same subject is that it dives a lot into CSS2, giving me a head's up on features to come. Neat. Somebody else commented about the lack of info on external style sheets. That's a dumb comment because you can only learn how to write an external style sheet if you know the individual bits of code used. And the book *does* mention how to use external style sheets -- but most of the examples are inline, which is easier to illustrate. Thumbs up on this book!
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Summary: CORE CSS - A Gold Mine for Experienced Developers
Review: Core Cascading Style Sheets is an outstanding, comprehensive guide to writing style sheets for the experienced Web developer. Its strengths are: a) the detailed descriptions of selectors and declarations and their uses; b) the sorting of styles by CSS1 and CSS2; c) the ability of different browsers on different platforms to render individual selectors and declarations. The "gold mine" in this book is the many tables that map styles to browsers with a rating of how the browsers render them. This book could also be very useful for an entry- to mid-level developer if mentoring by an experienced developer were available. The mentoring would have to guide the less experienced developer through the HTML 4.0/4.01 standard to ensure that the styles and their accompanying HTML would validate. [The book provides HTML examples using some deprecated tags (e.g., , ). Also, there could be some surprises when trying to validate some of the styles. For example, the W3C validator wants some color declarations to be accompanied by a background color - even if it is transparent.]
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Summary: Excellent Reference for CSS
Review: Core CSS Cascading Style Sheets is a book that every web designer who wants to use or uses CSS should have in their library. Avoiding CSS for some time, I finally decided to look into CSS for my site designs. Setting up type (i.e., typography) for a web page is a hit and miss situation. It is problem that finally led me to employ CSS in my designs. I found Core CSS Cascading Style Sheets an excellent place to start. The book is a complete overview of CSS including, definitions, differences between the major browsers, what is and is not supported by major browsers, and examples. This book isa good investment if you plan on using CSS in your web designs. I would recommend Core CSS Cascading Style Sheets to anyone wanting to know more about CSS and its implimentation.
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Summary: Core CSS is the best!
Review: Core CSS is the best book dealing with Cascading Style Sheets that I have ever seen. It gives a good explanation of each element used in creating CSS for the web. I would recommend this book to anyone who would have trouble writing CSS code.
Rating:
Summary: Good reference book
Review: CSS is not fun to learn because it is dealing with boring subjects such as padding, spacing, margin, indent, etc.. My strategy is to use an already set-up css file by others, then modify it as needed. This is a marvelous book for that purpose because it explains each property clearly and gives simple samples. Over all speaking, this is the best you can find in the current market.
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Summary: Terribly disappointing
Review: Despite having a very good index, this book is not adequate even as a reference book, let alone instructing on the nuances of web-site development supported by CSS, due to its poor use of examples, skimpy descriptions of subjects, large typeface with wide-margins (leaving scant room for CONTENT), and inappropriate inclusion of a worthless color section.
As an avid reader of the PH CORE series of books (Cay Horstmann's Java books being the shining jewels, IMHO), this book left me terribly disappointed. This book has sat on my shelves for years, and in the event that I need help with something relating to CSS, I will go online and look it up there, rather than suffer the frustration of trying to find something in this overly-sized book.
To illustrate my rant, in many places the book references the fact that "colors have changed on the page," as you could clearly see WERE THE BOOK IN >>COLOR<<, yet the actual color section of the book contains a chart detailing compatibility of CSS properties in various browsers from IE 3.02 to Opera 3.6, which CLEARLY could be represented by a normal black-and-white chart with symbols denoting in which browsers a property is safe to be used. The color section of the book, which is very nice high-quality glossy stock, could be used more appropriately to illustrate how CSS can be used to control things such as, oh I don't know, maybe COLOR?!?!?!
And clearly the overwhelming point of CSS is that the styles should be set up in a SEPARATE STYLE SHEET, not embedded into the HTML code, which Keith never illustrates anywhere. It would have been a real bonus if he had included two pages that had the same underlying HTML code, but were completely different looking based solely on the stylesheet used. Perhaps that would have been a good use for one of those pages in the glossy section - showing that you can have a "Halloween" version of a page, and a "Christmas" version of that same page, with no underlying code changes required.
This book has made me change my philosophy regarding CORE books, from having no doubts that the content of the book will be worth the price, to being wary of purchasing another tome to be relegated exclusively to propping up the good books on the shelves of my library.....
Rating:
Summary: Belongs on every web designer's book shelf
Review: Fantastic book! If you already know your way around HTML and know the basics of cascading style sheets (CSS), this is the book to buy. It is designed as a reference book with plenty of code examples (code examples that WORK too!!). I found the writing style and organization to be very similar to Danny Goodman's Dynamic HTML book by O'Reilly. (Another book that I use frequently.) It also does a good job explaining which CSS properties will work in certain browsers, like Internet Explorer, Netscape, and Opera and on various platforms - Windows, Mac, and Unix. Although keep in mind that this book was published in 2000. At that time Internet Explorer was at version 5.0, Netscape was stuck at 4.x, and Opera was at 3.6. During those days, CSS2, and some properties of CSS1, were considered bleeding edge technologies and didn't work well in all browsers and all operating systems. But today, most new browsers are cross-platform and will work with the CSS1 and CSS2 examples in this book without any problems. So even though this book is more than two years old - an eternity in Internet time - the content is even more valuable today than when it was published. Now it's time to get rid of those tables and <font> tags and start stylin'!
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Summary: Check out the chapter on Aural Properties
Review: For a certain class of web authors, HTML has proved to be frustratingly obtuse. One explicit aim of HTML was that is only consists of recommendations to a browser. Each browser takes on HTML as advisory only, as far as the presentation is concerned. If your website has mostly text or, more commonly, if you are authoring a noncommercial website, then the HTML restrictions may be fine. But for those authors whose expertise is page layout and desktop publishing, it is very inadequate. Thus CSS was born. By now, it is officially in its second version and compellingly mature. The book describes it all. PLUS the proposed CSS3 extensions. The teaching is straightforward, and it makes CSS to be no harder than HTML. Which is commendable, because one of HTML's strengths was that it was easy to learn, and that you could quickly write simple HTML pages, without having to know most of the language. The book builds on this by presenting CSS in the same way. The book also devotes a chapter to that some might regard as potentially the most powerful new thing introduced in CSS2: Aural properties. Most browsers still can't handle these. But that is one of the attractions. You can glimpse what future browsers will do - being able to read out web pages. Lest you think this is frivolous, there is vast potential for cellphones and other small devices which have limited screens and might benefit from hands-free operation.
Rating:
Summary: Very good reference
Review: Hi,
I was not (and still am) an expert in computer graphics, but my new project I need to struggle with all the topics concerning color, font, floating pictures etc...
I need a book to begin with, and this is a good starting point, expecially because it does not force you to keep surfing the web for reference.
It gives you a deep coverage of the topic, examples, and for each topic there is a browser compatibily session that helps you to understand where you can use it or not.
Max Pellizzaro.
http://www.maxpellizzaro.com
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