CSS in easy steps

There are CCS gurus. And then there are the rest of us. The gurus create entire web sites using lots of cascading style sheets (CSS) and hardly any HTML. The rest of us can just about manage to style a headline in bold. As for all that ‘cascading’ stuff, well, life is too short to learn how to use that...

Or then again, maybe not.

I have to say that I generally avoid CSS experts like the plague. Many of them have an annoying tendency to display their own style-sheet virtuosity while pouring scorn upon those lesser mortals (such as me!) who can’t make head or tail of what they are on about. Happily, Mike McGrath, author of ‘CSS In Easy Steps’, is not one of them. His book is clear, helpful and un-preachy. It explains CSS in a way that even I can understand.

The first thing to say about this book is that it looks nice. It is quite short, neatly laid out and printed in colour throughout. This may seem trivial but I can tell you that, having waded through far too many 1000+ page, text-heavy technical tomes, I really do think that a clear layout and a reasonable degree of brevity are fine and rare qualities in a computer book.

The book begins by explaining the whole idea behind ‘cascading’ styles before moving on to the specifics of creating style ‘rules’. There is then a detailed explanation of how to select ‘targets’ - that is, specific HTML elements specified by tags such as div or h1. It then moves on to explain how to select by class or identity and so on. In fact, if you are new to CSS by the time you are 30 pages into the book you should already have a pretty good grasp of the fundamentals of using styles and style sheets.

Later chapters in the book guide you through more advanced topics such as laying out pages using ‘floating’ content boxes, hiding and showing images and changing the cursor. Most topics provide guidance in the form of numbered steps with margin notes giving hints and tips. There is a good reference section at the back with brief syntax details and bits of sample code. You can also download all the samples in the book from the publisher’s web site.

Overall this is a great introduction to CSS. Recommended.