CSS books

From the author of the top-selling book Learning PHP, MySQL & JavaScript and the popular Robin Nixon's HTML5 Crash Course, this new CSS & CSS 3 course teaches you everything you need to know about the web layout language, all the way from the basics, up to advanced features such as animations, transformations, shadows, web font management and much, much more.
Everything is clearly explained with plenty of examples and figures, and you will absolutely find this one of the easiest courses you have ever taken. Once you've finished it, you'll completely understand CSS and CSS3, and be fully confident of how to use it to make really impressive and dynamic web pages.
Starting from the basics of CSS (which experienced users can skim) the book covers everything you need to know about CSS and CSS3 in these 16 easy-to-follow lectures:

1. Introduction to CSS
2. The CSS Rules
3. CSS Selectors
4. The CSS Cascade
5. CSS Fonts & Typography
6. CSS Color & Position
7. The CSS Box Model
8. Introduction to CSS3
9. CSS3 Attribute Selectors
10. CSS3 Backgrounds
11. CSS3 Borders
12. CSS3 Box Shadows, Overflow & Columns
13. CSS3 Colors & Opacity
14. CSS3 Text Effects & Web Fonts
15. CSS3 Transformations & Transitions
16. CSS3 3D Transformation

After reading this book you will be fully up-to-date on all the latest powerful design features provided by CSS3, and will be all set to bring your web designs up to the next level.

Part of the highly successful Shelly Cashman series, this text provides a comprehensive introduction to HTML and leads the user through a clear, step-by-step, screen-by-screen approach to learning. Readers learn how to create a Web page using HTML, format the page, add graphics, and more.

Cascading Style Sheets is an essential stylesheet language to designers who want their webpages to stand out among the trillions on the Web. In straightforward language, this book explains CSS. Author Mike McGrath begins with a brief history of Web design and then explains how style sheets determine the presentation of elements within HTML documents, and how CSS makes for a simpler and more streamlined HTML markup. Examples show how CSS rules control the appearance of text, content boxes, lists, tables, backgrounds, and how they can create dynamic effects. This updated edition covers Web 2.0 components and includes useful screenshots illustrating each aspect of CSS.

There’s a real connection between craftsmanship and Web design. That’s the theme running through Handcrafted CSS: More Bulletproof Web Design, by bestselling author Dan Cederholm, with a chapter contributed by renowned Web designer and developer Ethan Marcotte. This book explores CSS3 that works in today’s browsers, and you’ll be convinced that now’s the time to start experimenting with it.
Whether you’re a Web designer, project manager, or a graphic designer wanting to learn more about the fluidity that’s required when designing for the Web, you’ll discover the tools to create the most flexible, reliable, and bulletproof Web designs. And you’ll finally be able to persuade your clients to adopt innovative and effective techniques that make everyone’s life easier while improving the end user’s experience. This book’s seven chapters deconstruct various aspects of a case-study Web site for the Tugboat Coffee Company, focusing on aspects that make it bulletproof and demonstrate progressive enrichment techniques over more traditional labor-intensive methods.
Subjects covered in this book include:

• building for unanticipated future use

• progressively enriching designs using CSS3 properties

• using RGBA color for transparency with an alpha channel

• modular float management

• crafting flexible frameworks

• fluid layouts using grid-based design principles

• craftsmanship details on typography, jQuery, and shifting backgrounds

The video included with this special edition features author Dan Cederholm as he illustrates 10 essential Web design guidelines. Enhancing the content in this book, the Handcrafted CSS: Bulletproof Essentials DVD will arm you with a checklist to make your next project a flexible, adaptable, and wellcrafted design.

It’s widely predicted that mobile phones and tablets will overtake desktop PCs as the most common Web access devices within the next two or three years. Adobe is responding to this dramatic shift by focusing on new tools to develop websites for multiple platforms with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in Dreamweaver CS5.5. In particular, Dreamweaver engineers have been working closely with the developers of jQuery, the de-facto standard JavaScript framework, to develop jQuery Mobile. This is a new JavaScript/CSS framework designed to create websites and applications that work consistently in all major mobile platforms, including iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and Symbian (Nokia). This book explores in depth the integration of jQuery Mobile in Dreamweaver, together with other new features aimed at building websites that work across multiple devices.
Using a series of practical examples, the book will show how to optimize an existing website for display in desktops, tablets, and mobile phones, using CSS media queries. Readers will also learn how to create a dedicated mobile site using jQuery Mobile. Although Dreamweaver will generate much of the necessary code automatically, the book will explain the structure of jQuery Mobile websites and web applications, so that developers can go beyond the basics to add custom functionality and design features. The book will also utilize the core jQuery framework, demonstrating how the new jQuery code hinting in Dreamweaver CS5.5 speeds up the development process for experienced developers and acts as a learning aid for those new to jQuery. Readers will learn how to convert a jQuery Mobile web application into a native app (that can be loaded on an iPhone or Android device) using PhoneGap, another open source framework.

Web site design has grown up. Unlike the old days, when designers cobbled together chunky HTML, bandwidth-hogging graphics, and a prayer to make their sites look good, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) now lets your inner designer come out and play. But CSS isn't just a tool to pretty up your site; it's a reliable method for handling all kinds of presentation--from fonts and colors to page layout. "CSS: The Missing Manual" clearly explains this powerful design language and how you can use it to build sparklingly new Web sites or refurbish old sites that are ready for an upgrade.

Like their counterparts in print page-layout programs, style sheets allow designers to apply typographic styles, graphic enhancements, and precise layout instructions to elements on a Web page. Unfortunately, due to CSS's complexity and the many challenges of building pages that work in all Web browsers, most Web authors treat CSS as a kind of window-dressing to spruce up the appearance of their sites. Integrating CSS with a site's underlying HTML is hard work, and often frustratingly complicated. As a result many of the most powerful features of CSS are left untapped. With this book, beginners and Web-building veterans alike can learn how to navigate the ins-and-outs of CSS and take complete control over their Web pages' appearance.

Author David McFarland (the bestselling author of O'Reilly's Dreamweaver: The Missing Manual) combines crystal-clear explanations, real-world examples, a dash of humor, and dozens of step-by-step tutorials to show you ways to design sites with CSS that work consistently across browsers. You'll learn how to:

• Create HTML that's simpler, uses less code, is search-engine friendly, and works well with CSS
  
• Style text by changing fonts, colors, font sizes, and adding borders
  
• Turn simple HTML links into complex and attractive navigation bars-complete with CSS-only rollover effects that add interactivity to your Web pages
  
• Style images to create effective photo galleries and special effects like CSS-based drop shadows
  
• Make HTML forms look great without a lot of messy HTML
• Overcome the most hair-pulling browser bugs so your Web pages work consistently from browser to browser
  
• Create complex layouts using CSS, including multi-column designs that don't require using old techniques like HTML tables Style Web pages for printing

Unlike competing books, this Missing Manual doesn't assume that everyone in the world only surfs the Web with Microsoft's Internet Explorer; our book provides support for all major Web browsers and is one of the first books to thoroughly document the newly expanded CSS support in IE7, currently in beta release.

Want to learn how to turn humdrum Web sites into destinations that will capture viewers and keep them longer? Pick up CSS: The Missing Manual and learn the real magic of this tool.

Millions of Web designers use Dreamweaver and most of them think creating CSS-based, standards-compliant sites is a challenge. In Mastering CSS with Dreamweaver CS4, authors Stephanie Sullivan and Greg Rewis bridge the gaps between the worlds of CSS design and Dreamweaver by demonstrating how to use Dreamweaver CS4 and CSS together to create individualized, standards-based layouts. Through hands-on projects with lots of visuals, the book enables every user of Dreamweaver to learn CSS effectively and easily.

• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a method of describing how a Web page should look in a Web browser, but a growing number of browsers do not support CSS in the same way, forcing developers to constantly play catch-up to keep their sites consistent
• Bestselling author Joe Lowery eases the pain for those Web developers who aren't feeling the CSS love-he guides readers through real-world workarounds that will help a CSS-based site look and work the way it was meant to
• Readers will grit their teeth, clench their fists, and roll their eyes for the last time once they learn how to craft fluid multi-column layouts, build interactive navigation, fix the Box Model, implement CSS hacks in Dreamweaver, and more cool tricks

HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS, 2nd Edition is for web developers looking to create websites using Cascading Style Sheets for layout, which allow for faster page downloads, easier maintenance, faster website redesigns, and better search engine optimization.

HTML Utopia covers all aspects of using Cascading Style Sheets in Web Development, and is a must-read for Web Developers designing new sites or upgrading existing ones to use CSS layouts.

This book includes one of the most comprehensive CSS2 references on the market. Jeffrey Zeldman, web design guru and co-founder of the Web Standards Project, says "After reading this book, you will not only understand how to use CSS to emulate old-school, table-driven web layouts, you will be creating websites that would be impossible to design using traditional methods".

The second edition of this popular book includes brand new coverage of Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 1.1, new CSS Solutions, and greatly expanded coverage of popular, cross-browser, CSS layout techniques.

From The Back Cover
"Now You Too Can Easily Create Modern 'Table-free' Websites Using CSS from scratch"

Rachel Andrew and Dan Shafer's book is a comprehensive guide to learning and applying the principles of CSS to your Website.

This book will teach you how to

• Write faster loading, dramatically smaller pages
• Speed up site maintenance by separating the content from the layout
• Create flexible 3-column designs with ease
• Write device-independent CSS that will work on everything from a PC to an internet refridgerator
• Write search engine friendly pages that can actually be understood by search engines
• Design sites that are standards compliant
• Accomodate older Web Browsers
• And much more...

CSS3 is the technology behind most of the eye-catching visuals on the Web today, but the official documentation can be dry and hard to follow. Luckily, The Book of CSS3 distills the heady technical language of the CSS3 specification into plain English, so you can get started on your next project right away.

With real-world examples and a focus on results, The Book of CSS3 shows you how to transform ordinary text into stunning, richly detailed web pages fit for any browser. You'll master the latest cutting-edge CSS features, like multi-column layouts, borders and box effects, and new color and opacity settings. You'll also learn how to:

• Stylize text with fully customizable outlines, drop shadows, and other effects
• Create, position, and resize unlimited background images on the fly
• Spice up static web pages with event-driven transitions and animations
• Apply 2D and 3D transformations to text and images
• Use linear and radial gradients to create smooth color transitions
• Tailor a website's appearance to smartphones and other devices

From the simplest blog layout to the most feature-rich web portal, The Book of CSS3 puts the whole wide world of web design at your fingertips. The future of web design is now—what will you create with it?

5 Reasons to Start Using CSS3 from the Author

1. Device-responsive pages
   The big growth area of web browsing is on smartphone and tablet devices such as Android, iPhone and iPad. New media features and page layout modules in CSS3 let you make pages which respond to the capabilities of the device that's viewing them, automatically optimizing your content for multiple screen sizes and giving your visitors a tailored experience.


2. Eye candy!
   CSS3 brings web documents to life without complicated JavaScript. Rotate, scale and skew page elements in both two and three dimensions, add smooth transitional animations to elements when their values change, and go even further with keyframe animations which give you fine control over the behavior of your page elements.


3. A better reading experience
   The web was made for reading text, but for years we've had to use a handful of fonts in a very conservative way. CSS3 brings the power to use any font you wish, to decorate the text with drop shadows and outlining, plus new ways of laying out the text such as in multiple columns, like a newspaper or magazine.


4. Easier to maintain
   Using CSS2.1 usually means adding images (and extra markup) to your documents in order to achieve what should be simple effects. Something as basic as adding rounded corners to an element can mean using up to four extra empty elements to accommodate the graphics required to fake the appearance. CSS3 was created to address just these problems, so you can add rounded corners, drop shadows, gradient backgrounds and much more without writing unnecessary markup or creating multiple image files -- meaning a lot less work to make and maintain your documents.


5. Cleaner code
   The greatly expanded range of selectors in CSS3 means you can add special formatting to links depending on their destination, loop through long tables and lists, even select form elements depending on their current state -- all without having to clutter your code with surplus class attributes.