Author: Mike McGrath
Publisher: Easy Steps
Pages: 192
ISBN: 978-1840788754
Print: 1840788755
Kindle: B083ZJD91Z
Audience: CSS beginners
Rating: 5
Reviewed by: David Conrad

If you are looking for a simple beginner's introduction to CSS then this book fits the bill.

It is in full colour with lots of screen dumps and annotated with useful notes and warnings. It all seems very easy to read and follow - partly because, once you get the basic idea, CSS isn't rocket science.

The whole point is that CSS isn't programming. It is the layout partener to HTML. In principle HTML doesn't determine layout, that is the job of CSS. Of course, there are a set of defaults that means that an HTML page without CSS will render, but these days it is a rare page the displays in a default style. Most have hundreds of lines of CSS that determines their format. This all sounds easy, but layout is more difficult than you might think.

The book starts off from the very simple ideas of CSS - cascading, selectors and so on. This is all about how to determine what a style applies to. As an example of how it works, Chapter 2 goes into detail about how to style a box, which is perhaps the most basic and most useful thing you can know how to do. It also considers layout, i.e. how formatted boxes position themselves including how to construct column layouts. Next we concentrate on formatting particular items - text and tables.

The final third of the book deals with more complicated ideas such as effects, hiding and revealing content, roll over, user interaction, gradient fills and so on. Chapter 6 deals with setting defaults and creating more responsive design. It also deals with query media so you can adjust your layout to the current screen size. Chapter 7 shows how you can enable and able styles using JavaScript including multicolum layouts. Chapter 8 introduces the still fairly new topic of CSS grids. The final chapter brings it all together and explains how to create responsive layouts by hiding content and using scaled images.

About the only thing the book doesn’t cover is how HTML design tools work with CSS and, to be honest, nothing but a book specifically on the editor in question would help with this problem. If you do use an editor, however, understanding how CSS works is your best way to find out how to edit what it produces.

This is a good first introduction to CSS which is easy to read and understand. If you stick with it then it even takes you into some more advanced topics where the use of CSS really starts to pay off.

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