Somewhat Longer Review

Contents

• The Cover
• About the Reviewer
• What You Get
• What I Like
• Wishes
• Who's the Book for?
• Final Thoughts

Notes:

• Published by O'Reilly.
• Click on the cover image above to go to the catalog entry for the book being reviewed here.
• In fact, click on any of the cover images on this page to go to the catalog entry for the corresponding book.

The Cover

The Title: Primarily from the O'Reilly website, I understand that O'Reilly Cookbooks typically

• contain many recipes in a Problem/Solution/Discussion format.
• contain coding examples that illustrate the solution
• are organized to allow you to pick and choose what interests you at a particular time

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. These style sheets

• can be attached to a document
• are used to specify how a document is to be presented (i.e., it specifies fonts, colors, sizes, spacing, etc.)

Other Text: We also see on the cover

• "Quick Solutions to Common CSS Problems"
• "Covers CSS 2.1"

CSS 2.1

• is a language for specifying presentation
• is a version of CSS
• builds on CSS1 and CSS2 (see Acronyms)
• supports media-specific style sheets for presentation on printers, hand held devices, braille devices etc. (as well as typical browsers on a personal computer)

Note:

• For more info about CSS and its versions (or levels), see Some Relevant Acronyms in the left column.

A Fitting Cover: The book delivers on the promise of the cover.

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About the Reviewer

Design Background: OK, I

• am webmaster of a number of non-profit sites
• have been using CSS for a number of years
• tend to keep HTML/CSS simple
• use JavaScript some but not intensively
• generally edit CSS and HTML using vim (i.e. a text editor)

However, I'm not a professional webdesigner.

Publisher: I have many O'Reilly books, and I am a big fan of O'Reilly.

OS and Browsers: When I access the web, I'm usually doing that from a Linux box. The browsers I use the most for accessing the web are Firefox, Konqueror and Opera.

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What You Get

Recipes: The heart of the book is 10 chapters of CSS recipes. Each chapter contains recipes on the subject of the chapter. For example, chapter 6 contains 5 recipes that are concerned with tables. The book contains over 80 recipes.

Each recipe has the following parts

• Problem - a simple statement of the problem
• Solution - (a step or) steps to follow and some code (CSS, HTML and/or Javascript) to suggest a characteristic solution
• Discussion - an explanation of the solution including additional information and perspective that might help in applying the recipe
• See Also - a reference or references to related recipes, the W3C CSS 2.1 spec, etc.

Figures are often used to show

• the default display (i.e. the display if the recipe is not applied)
• a display resulting from applying the recipe

Sample Designs: There are also a few sections with Titles beginning "Sample Design:" (or "Example Design:"). These sample designs

• address more ambitious problems than the recipes do
• are longer than the recipes
• do not follow the recipe format

Other Stuff: There's what looks like a useful Resources appendix. It has a number of links that are of interest to me. But I've only followed a few of them so far.

The index looks adequate. However, the organization of recipes is so clear to me that normally I find myself using the table of contents to look for stuff instead of the index.

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What I Like

The Recipe Format: I like the pragmatic recipe format.

Useful Recipes: Many of the recipes were immediately useful. In fact, in writing this review, I used a number of the recipes including

• Recipe 1.2 Specifying Font Measurements and Sizes
• Recipe 1.8 Creating a Heading with Stylized Text and Borders
• Recipe 3.5 Creating Rollovers without JavaScript
• Recipe 4.7 Moving the Marker Inside the List
• Recipe 6.2 Setting the Borders and Cell Padding
• Recipe 6.3 Setting the Styles Within Table Cells

All these recipes worked in all three of my favorite browsers.

Understandable Organization: The grouping of recipes into chapters is helpful.

Finite Length: I like it that the book is relatively short, that is, 80 some recipes and 272 pages by different measures.

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Wishes

I was planning to call this part of my review "Gripes", but I don't actually have any gripes about this book; so I've called it "Wishes" so I'll have something to say.

Availability of Links: Many of the links in the Also See part of Recipes and in the Resources Appendix are of interest to me, but it's a drag to type in so many links. So I wish the book had a reference to a place on the web where anyone could find all the links.

It turns out that I do have access to the links through my online copy of this book that's on my Safari online bookshelf. :) But not everyone has Safari. :(

Browser Compliance: I wish browsers all had W3C recommendations and candidate recommendations implemented and working properly.

The book has a whole chapter of recipes that are workarounds related to this problem. And the book warns us of the problem on some other recipes too.

One recipe I applied didn't work in one of my browsers until I made a small change. As far as I can tell, this was a browser problem, but, hey, maybe it was me. Anyway, the problem was not with the book, since the approach I was trying deviated significantly from the recipe.

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Who's the Book for?

The book is for web designers and developers interested in practical CSS solutions to common problems in web design.

Prerequisites: The book says the reader should

• be at least a part time web designer or developer
• have a working knowledge of JavaScript
• know basic HTML
• be able to edit CSS and HTML code

Notes:

• As far as I can tell, very little in this book really depends on the reader knowing JavaScript. I wouldn't rule out getting this book just because you don't feel comfortable with JavaScript.
• On the other hand, I think some exposure to CSS would be a reasonable prerequisite.

What Not to Look for: This book is

• not a CSS tutorial
• not a reference manual for CSS
• not a Cookbook of JavaScript solutions to common web design problems.

If you want one of these, I suggest

• to find a tutorial, do a search on CSS tutorial on your favorite search engine
• for a CSS reference, try "CSS: The Definitive Guide"
• for a Cookbook Javascript/CSS solutions, try "JavaScript and DHTML Cookbook"

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Final Thought

This book is a classic O'Reilly Cookbook. If the the topic appeals to you and you like the O'Reilly Cookbook format, this could be a good book for you. It was useful for me.

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