The Art and Science of CSS: Create Inspirational, Standards-Based Web Designs

by Jonathan Snook, Steve Smith, Cameron Adams

CSS-based design doesn't need to be boring. The Art & Science of CSS brings together a talented collection of designers who will show you how to take the building blocks of your web site's design (such as headings, navigation, forms, and more) and bring them to life with fully standards-compliant CSS. This full color book helps you to design web sites that not only work well across all browsers, are easy to maintain, and are highly accessible, but are also visually stunning.

From the Publisher

Jonathan Snook, Steve Smith, Jina Bolton, Cameron Adams, and David Johnson, five of the biggest names in CSS design have joined forces to bring you The Art & Science Of CSS.

Beautifully presented in full color, this book will teach you how to apply innovative CSS-based techniques to create visually stunning headings, forms, menus, navigation, backgrounds, and much more...

Using The Art & Science Of CSS, you'll see just how easy it is to unleash your creative talents and design inspirational web sites with CSS.

All designs in this book are visually appealing and inspiring. The CSS code used to create each of the components is included and guaranteed to be simple, efficient and cross-browser compatible. Among its many treasures, this book will show you how

All designs in this book are visually appealing and inspiring. The code CSS code used to create each of the components is provided and is guaranteed to be simple, efficient and cross-browser compatible.

Who Should Read This Book?

This book is ideal for anyone who wants to gain the practical skills involved in using CSS to make attractive web sites, especially if you're not the type who likes to learn by memorizing a formal specification and then trying to work out which browsers implemented it completely (does anyone enjoy reading specifications?). The only knowledge you'll need to have is some familiarity with HTML. This book will give designers the skills they need to implement their ideas, and provides developers with creative inspiration through practical examples.

Genres: Nonfiction, Design, Technology, Programming, Website Design, Computers, Computer Science

213 pages, Paperback

First published March 9, 2007

Reviews

[Jenifer Hanen · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is not a comprehensive A-Z book on CSS, it is a compilation of seven essay / tutorials by five different authors on specific topics (headings, images, backgrounds, navigation, forms, rounded corners, and tables). This book is much like 7 blind folks describing an elephant and whole swatches of the elephant are left uncovered and undescribed.

It seems to be a trend amongst the tech publishers to put out books with multiple authors, yet very few of them provide any cohesive editing and authorial narrative between sections, of which The Art & Science of CSS is an offender.

Publishers and Editors, please either take a cue from short story and essay compilations and give each author an introduction at the beginning of each chapter, tell my why I should care and what this person can educate me on. If that is not the approach you want take, then have one main author or editor who crafts all the chapters into a cohesive whole with good transitions and point of view.

Sitepoint - Hire an editor who can edit. Pick one main author. Introduce the guest authors at each point where the authorship transitions. Give the reader a cohesive POV.

Amazon leads one to believe that Jonathan Snook is the main author, he is not, but has a few bits on javascript & css in several chapters. I would have liked this book a great deal more if it actually was the Art & Science of CSS with a strong voice all the way through, rather than just a few drill downs into a few topics. Cameron Adams or Jina Bolton both had great written tones & POV, why not have one of them "lead" the reader through the content?

[Dhuaine · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is actually a collection of seven detailed tutorials dealing with seven topics from the very basics to advanced features, mentioning also usability, search engine optimization and accessibility issues. There are headings, backgrounds, tables, forms, images, navigation and rounded corners. The only ones which can hold some secrets from an experienced developer are forms and tables. I admit that I don't use tables often and I didn't know some of their features, so I did learn something from this book.
Forms section was okay - but I think I've already seen it on Sitepoint website. The book also contains a very user-friendly tutorial for sIFR, a very nice addition.
All in all, this book is not bad, but I don't think it's worth its full price.

[Ulee ☄︎]

Wow, I've had this book for years and I never read it until now. I just skimmed through all the pages and it is all stuff I already know. Plus a lot of the stuff is outdated because it talks about using flash for font replacement using sifr. These days you can use the Google Font library or Adobe Typekit to change the font on a page. it also talks about tricks to get rounded corners but you can do that with CSS3.
So no I would not recommend this book to anyone unless you want a history lesson and are glad things are much better today.

[Aileen Bernadette Urquhart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, inspiring book. What a pity it's so out of date. (Written in 2007) I skipped so much of it as with CSS3 there are much easier ways of doing things. However, the book did go in to the psychology of design, and had me really wanting to start a new website!
You can buy copies of this book on Amazon for 1p!

[Gbadebo Ayangbile · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book about 7 or 8 years ago, when I was starting out, learning web development. It is an easy read for the beginner, and the intermediate level web dev would appreciate many of the topics and the practical approach the author takes in addressing many topics.

The Art & Science of CSS is one technical book I remember fondly.

[Corey Dutson · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's a bit dated now, and I'm a little late reading it. Having said that there were still a couple tricks that I learned from running through the book. If you're looking for a better grip on common CSS issues and how to get past them, this is a good choice.

[Ajitabh Pandey · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the best books I have read on CSS so far. Very beautifully explains how to create accessible and beautiful webdesigns. However, this is to be used only if you are familiar with HTML/CSS and want to sharpen your skill set.

[huydx · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book includes too much code, which is very redundant and waste of space. However, examples throughout the book is very self-explained, and provides concrete knowledge of basic CSS. I recommend this book for CSS beginner who want to learn basic css by examples.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great basic introduction to teble-less CSS webdesign as well as sIFR.

[Hanady · Rating 4 out of 5]

كتاب عملى جيد لمبتدئى
CSS
بأمثلة تفصيلية لعناصر تصميم صفحة موقع بأفضل طرق لكتابة الأكواد ،وأفكار أفضل وشروط يجب مراعاتها فى التصميم