CSS Pocket Guide

I like short books. I like small books. I like books that stick to the subject, get to the point and don’t waste my time with waffle. Which is why the CSS Pocket Guide is my kind of book. It’s small (it really does fit in the pocket of my jacket) and covers all the essential details of styling web pages with CSS in well under 300 pages.

The book is divided into 14 chapters. The first two chapters briefly describe the basics of CSS (what are style sheets, what does ‘cascading’ mean and so on) and CSS support in various Web browsers. The remaining chapters are devoted to the specifics of CSS: selectors, measurements, the box model, positioning and floats and so on. The pages are nicely laid out with small diagrams to show various positioning effects and lots of little code fragments to illustrate CSS syntax and techniques. It covers both CSS2 (the standard version) and CSS3 though the latter is still an emerging technology and is not likely to be high on many people’s lists of priorities for practical use just at the moment.

If you prefer your guides to be more visual, I’d recommend CSS In Easy Steps: this is a richly illustrated, full colour book, albeit one that is not likely to fit into a pocket. The CCS Pocket Guide is a great quick reference, however, and one that (even after years of using CSS) I’d be very happy to use for looking up the twiddly bits and pieces of CSS that are all to easy to forget. It doesn’t have a great many “fully worked” CSS examples – so if you want to see complex examples with many levels of cascading styles, this is not the book for you. But as a handy reference, it’s ideal.