The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks

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Author: Rachel Andrew
Format: Paperback, 400 pages
Publisher: SitePoint; 2nd edition (August 14, 2007)
ISBN-10: 097584198X
ISBN-13: 978-0975841983

Review by James Pyles
August 22, 2007

In some sense this book is the third in a trilogy published by Sitepoint on web design with The Art & Science of CSS and The Principles of Beautiful Web Design being the first two in the series. Since I wrote the reviews for the first two books for MCSEWorld.com, I thought I'd publish the review for The CSS Anthology here, too.

This book is similar in structure and purpose to a "hacks" or "cookbook" text in that it spends very little time on concept and focuses on teaching specific tasks you can perform with the technology. Chapter 1 does take you through a brief tour of the elements of CSS including selectors but if you knew nothing at all about CSS to begin with, it wouldn't help much. The reader is presumed to have a basic understanding of both HTML and CSS in order to get maximum benefit from this book.

This is a second edition and was produced mainly to update the technology for modern web browsers including IE7. In fact, Chapters 7 and 8 focus on tasks related to testing your work across browsers including text-only browsers and readers. This is an area that novice web designers tend to ignore and many don't even realize that webpages render differently in different browser platforms. Also, some browsers don't even handle specific CSS elements at all. Kudos to the author for including those chapters in her book.

The main difference between this book and a thousand other CSS books is the presentation. Although chapters are organized by task areas ("Navigation", "Tabular Data" and so on), within the chapters, information is organized as mini-HOW TOs such as "Can I use CSS and lists to create a navigation system with subnavigation?". The ideal use for this book is as a reference for a web designer who knows CSS in general but needs to know how to do something specific with styling (without having to scan through a standard CSS book's index).

I suppose you could read through the book cover-to-cover and in fact, some of the tasks in later chapters reference skills that were taught in earlier ones. If you didn't know very much about CSS and tried to use a more advanced tasks, you'd probably find yourself paging back to an earlier part of the book to figure out what to do. However, if you know the basic nuts and bolts of stylesheets, that won't be much of a burden.

I wouldn't recommend The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks as your first CSS experience but I would recommend Rachel Andrew's book as the third leg of a web designing tripod which includes The Art & Science of CSS and The Principles of Beautiful Web Design. With these three books in hand, the novice website developer will be well equipped to start designing and styling.