1. Do you need this book if you have neither version?
2. If you do have the first version is it worth purchasing the new version?

Keep reading to find out.

I purchased the second version of the book because the first version was a great book full of some useful techniques for any webdesigner that cares about good CSS and XHTML. After flipping through the new book, it looked an awful lot like the original, so I dug in deeper.

The book covers some things that are important to writing semantic XHTML. Such as using unordered lists to create a navigation.

I use unordered lists for all my navigations, as a lot of webdesigners do. You can take off the bullets, make it inline, add background images, rollovers, etc. Good stuff. Pretty basic IMO, but if you don’t know these techniques, this book covers it in depth.

Styling tables is covered. Yes, tables are horrible, but for tabular data they are still acceptable to use. And if styled nicely, they can be visually appealing. You can have the <tr> turn a different shade or color on rollover, which makes it easier to keep track of where you are reading on the page.

One of my favorite techniques Dan goes over is styling a blockquote. He has a technique that gives a rounded box with a large quote image in the background; one for the opening quote, and one for the closing quote. The tricky part here is making it expand, so no matter how long your quote is the box will stretch and the closing quote will be on the bottom right. Worth a bookmark for sure.

Next up is styling forms. I actually learned a lot of what I know about styling forms from the first version of this book. Styling the <fieldset> gives a nice clean look to the form. Best yet, you get to write hacks for IE!

Next up in the book is one of the topics new to this version 2 of the book. Microfomats! Now you may not know what these are, a lot of people probably don’t. I read about these a while back, and still haven’t used them. It makes sense though, and will hopefully catch on and be used in the future, so it’s great that Dan covered it here. Here is an example of what Microformats are. Say you have a website with a contact page. You can add what’s called a hCard to the page. This hCard contains all your contact information, allowing users to click on it and add it to their computers address book. Other software and web applications can scrape your website and extract this information from the hCard. The same goes for events, dates, etc. Microformats only make sense, so I’m sure in the future they will be huge.

Next up is styling <dl> and <dt> lists. This is something I personally need to use more often, I always use the unordered lists, when sometimes these other two options would be the better choice. Bookmarked!

There is a nice technique for a CSS style switcher. I actually just showed a way of adding a style switcher that works by itself, depending on the hour of the day. That post is right here. This is a manual technique. I’ve used this technique in the past, and will cover it in a post in the near future.

Other topics include image replacement, using reset styles for your CSS, and CSS Sprites. Using print styles is covered, another topic I need to come back to as I don’t take advantage of these enough.

So to wrap up my review of this book I must answer the questions I asked. Do you need this book if you don’t have either? Yes, go and buy it immediately. I don’t care if you’re an expert or a beginner. If you’re a beginner you need to learn the basics covered in this book, and then move on to the more advanced topics also covered. If you’re an expert than you already know who Dan Cederholm is, and that’s reason enough to buy the book.

What if you already have the first book.. is there enough new content in this book to rationalize buying the new version? Nope. You’re going to find yourself flipping through the pages looking for the new content. If you’re like me, you have a stack of books you’re trying to get through so having duplicate content is useless. The good news is you can give Dan your money in another way! May I recommend his new book, Handcrafted CSS. A great read, which I will review soon.

So there you have it, I hope I helped some people with their decision making.

-ilz

I’m obsessed with CSS.

There I said it. I have just about every CSS book that has received good reviews. As a freelance website designer I try to make time in between projects to read these books, pick up new tricks, and brush up on what I already know or may have forgotten. If the book is worthy I throw some bookmarks on important sections, so I can easily use it as a reference in the future.

As I finish these books I will be giving my honest reviews, be it negative or positive. Hopefully this will help you decide if the book is a good choice for you to purchase.

Continue reading for my review of CSS Mastery; Advanced Web Standards Solutions by Andy Budd. ©2006

Content Overview

This book by Andy Budd covers CSS topics from a beginners level to a more advanced level. I’m an advanced CSS user, but I actually enjoyed reading the entire book from cover to cover. I find that reading over things you already know or use is a good idea; you never know when you will pick up a little trick that will save you some time every time you are writing CSS. Plus, if you really do know and use a technique 100%, you can give yourself a pat on the back..haha.

Topics covered in this book include:

• Doctype
• Margin Collapsing
• Box Model
• Using Background Images
• Relative, Absolute, Fixed Positioning
• Image Replacement Techniques
• Styling Links, Lists, & Forms
• Layouts (2 & 3 Column, Elastic, Fluid, Fixed)
• Hacks & Conditional Statements

So you may have noticed the book above has bookmarks on it. That’s my actual copy of the book. When I read a book, I put these bookmarks on the MOST important parts. These are of course the most important to ME, maybe you wouldn’t even care about these topics. I do this so it’s easy to get back to these sections of the book when I’m designing and coding.. so I don’t have one of those, “I read about that somewhere” moments. Below I will quickly explain what I found to be the “bookmark worthy” parts of the book.

Highlighting the Current Page in Navigation

If you are on the “About” page of a website, the “About” text in the main navigation should be a different color than the rest of the links, right? This is good for the user experience, so they always quickly know what page they are currently on. On a small site this is simple; just throw a class on the list item for “About”. It gets more complicated on a larger scale site, with a lot of navigation items.

I design my sites using Dreamweaver. I find it to be a great tool, (as long as you know how to write code by hand of course). I like the template features. Why I mention this is because if you also use Dreamweaver templates, you will find the above current link technique very helpful in your website designs. You may notice one problem however, the above technique requires you to put a separate “ID” on your “BODY” tag of your pages. If you have a Dreamweaver template your body tag is not editable though.. so what do you do? I will be writing an article on this exact topic soon, so stay tuned. To wrap up, I find this the MOST IMPORTANT TOPIC in the entire book.. I use it on every site I code now.

Absolute & Fixed Positioning

This is a topic that can confusing to some CSS coders. To be honest, I put this bookmark in as a reminder to myself to come back at some point to try some Fixed Positioning techniques. I use Absolute all the time, but never really have a need for Fixed. I think some interesting designs could be achieved by having an item in exactly the same place on the screen though…TO BE CONTINUED!

Styling Forms

I find that spending 15-30 minutes styling a form with CSS can be the difference of a great looking page, and an eyesore. When I see generic inputs and buttons on forms on websites it drives me nuts. One thing I hate about unstyled forms is how different browsers show the inputs and buttons differently. As a designer, I want to be in control of how the form looks, not the browser! FORMS DON’T NEED TO BE UGLY!

Conditional Statements and Hacks

Honestly this bookmark is only on the book because I had some room left over. I use conditional statements and hacks, but have them memorized by this point in my career. I figured I’d throw the bookmark on in the chance that I come across the need for some hack of statement that I’m not so knowledgeable of, this will be a quick reference.

In Conclusion

So is this book right for you? How should I know! I can say that if I had to throw all my books away and keep only one book it would be a tossup between this book and “Web Standards Solutions” by Dan Cederholm *stay tuned for my review of that book*. I find CSS Mastery a great book filled with techniques that I either use or could use in my day to day workflow. I have some books that have advanced techniques that would be great if I had clients willing to pay 6 times what they are paying so I’d have the time to use these techniques. So having said that.. two thumbs up for this book from me!

-ilz out

CSS Mastery Advanced Web Standards Solutions by Andy Budd with Cameron Moll & Simon Collison website link

Link to CSS Mastery on Amazon