Okay, I need a show of hands; how many of you still design your web layouts with tables? Not because you don’t know any better, but because it’s just plain easier. (I’m sheepishly raising my hand.) We do it because it’s almost second nature, and because we assume that learning CSS positioning is hard. But in the back of all our heads (I hope) is a little voice saying, “You know this code isn’t clean, or flexible. You’re so old-fashioned.”

You see what I’m getting at, I’m sure; The CSS Anthology gets you on the right path to CSS-ifying your layouts easily and quickly. Given the subtitle 101 Essential Tips, Tricks, and Hacks, I expected a Killer Tips-style book, meaning something for those who already know and use CSS, or a very short book with a list of handy CSS rules. I was surprised to find that The CSS Anthology is actually a full-featured CSS guide with something to offer both new users and old pros.

This is Rachel Andrew’s second edition of the book, and it includes techniques geared toward today’s most popular browsers, namely Firefox and Internet Explorer, but potential conflicts with older platforms are also noted. Like any good CSS guide, The CSS Anthology begins with the basics of CSS and some text styling. Even if these topics are familiar to you, you’ll likely learn a few things you didn’t know, or perhaps finally make sense of when to use pixels, ems, and exes for size. Finally!

You’ll quickly feel comfortable with the extremely organized structure of the book, which is essential if you really plan to spend some time and learn with it. The chapters, like Navigation or CSS and Images, are built around questions you’re likely to have about CSS and your web pages. For example, “How do I create button-like navigation with CSS?” and “How do I fix my background in place when the page is scrolled?” This method is much better than the usual “Here’s a property, and here’s what it does.” approach. The text is dense (Welcome to coding, folks.), but each technique is illustrated, so you know exactly what’s being done and whether or not you’ll want to try it right now. The screenshots, paired with tutorial-style answers to each question, make every technique seem doable, even to the newest CSS user.

It’s not all for the CSS uninitiated, though. Everyone can make good use of the Cross-Browser Techniques chapter — my favorite in the book. It covers testing in many browsers on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and tells you how to address users that you know can’t see your fancy-schmancy CSS designs.

And it all comes back to CSS instead of tables for positioning and layout. The final chapter of the book is 80 pages of the stuff that I (and many of you, admit it) need to pay attention to. You’ll learn easy techniques that’ll allow you to ditch tables, and finally take advantage of the flexibility of CSS positioning. You’ll have to think for yourself about how to adapt your existing designs, but the author gets you off to a great start, covering the basics of divs and floats, and some parts of specific design layout types.

Downloads and updates can be found online, so this is a book that will teach you CSS now and also serve as a helpful reference for tons of web designs to come.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 16th, 2007 at 12:44 pm and is filed under Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.