CSS: The Definitive Guide

This 4th Edition of Eric Meyer & Estelle Weyl’s CSS book is very thorough and comprehensive. At over 1,000 pages, every topic that I wanted to study is included. I’m planning on using this new CSS book as a reference book so being able to locate specific topics fairly quickly is important. The Table of Contents is laid out in a very detailed format along with the page numbers. To find something, you can easily just look at the Table of Contents and then flip to the page. Also the book has a comprehensive Index that lists pretty much everything you’ll be looking for right there. As a test, I looked in the Index for some random topics and found all of them listed in the Index with the page numbers. The book includes 3 Appendixes. Appendix A – Animatable Properties The properties included here are the properties given in the CSS Transitions specification and are CSS2.1. Appendix B – Basic Property Reference Properties are listed by name and are in alphabetical order. Example, picked at random: Property word-break Default value normal Value syntax normal |break-all|keep-all Inh Y Anim Y Appendix C – Color Equivalence Table This table lists the Color Name, RGB decimal, RGB percentage, HSL and Hexadecimal for about 4 pages worth of colors. You can look up colors by name and it serves as a quick reference for finding a color code to type in your style sheet. Example, picked at random: Color Name lightgray RGB decimal rgb(211,211,211) RGB percentage rgb(82.7%,82.7%,82.7%) HSL hsl(0,0,82.7%) Hexadecimal #D3D3D3 The content included in this book makes it clear the authors are experienced web developers. I’m going to look through my other CSS books and discard some in favor of this new one.

This is THE must-own CSS book. At over 1000 pages, it’s not exactly enjoyable bathtub reading, but is anything truly enjoyable these days anyway? Yep! This book! It covers everything about CSS you can imagine, including full coverage of CSS Grid, which is going to change everything. O’Reilly also sells individual sections of this book as mini books and I purchased most of those months ago. Those are EXCELLENT for bath reading, btw. I’ve been wanting to take this book to the office to show my coworkers, but I’m worried I may end up too sweaty by the time I carry it up 5 flights of stairs. It is that impressive! When it arrived at my house, my wife literally exclaimed, “WTF is that giant book?!” and now the chair I placed it on has a permanent dent in the cushion. So far, I’m like 4 chapters in (yes, I’m reading it cover-to-cover like a Nicholas Spark book) and I already feel like I’ve learned so many new things about selectors, specificity, and the cascade that I didn’t know before and I’ve been writing CSS forever. You can literally just open this book to any page and learn something new. I wish I could own this with a hard cover. I also wish I could shake Mr. Meyer’s and Ms. Weyl’s hands and thank them while also acknowledging the worn-down nubs that used to be their typing fingers. Buy this physical book! You will not regret it. Pro tip: buy some post-it flags while you’re at it because you are going to want to bookmark the heck out of it.

I have been working with CSS since it first came out and have worked to improve my knowledge with each new level as it was introduced. But, after getting just barely started in this book, I found a whole bunch I did not know about CSS 2.1 and CSS 3. If you only want one definitive guide to help you develop CSS skills, this is certainly it. . Eric Meyer is always a pleasure to read. He writes in a manor that is easy to read, and his high level of knowledge of a subject shines throughout this book. It IS a long read, and many parts you may have to read 2 or 3 times to absorb the content. I am only about 1/2 way through, but have already incorporated much of what I have learned so far to greatly improve readability and other issues on the web sites I manage. Recommend this highly for any developers ready to go the next step. Makes no difference the scripting language you use, we all need better CSS skills.

I am reviewing from the perspective of someone that has done web development for many years, but has only learned CSS in a piecemeal and ad hoc fashion - picking up the parts that I needed at any given moment in time, but not as a fundamental subject to be understood from the ground up. As of 10/22/17 I am over 100 pages in to the book and so far the content is excellent and deserving of five stars: it's comprehensive, strikes a good balance between terse and lengthy, and the examples are quickly understood. I am docking one star due to two issues with the Kindle edition of the book: 1) There is no table of contents. This makes easily jumping to content of interest difficult, and is requiring that I fill my highlights with section headings. 2) There are formatting issues such as section headings not having margins, tables having odd alignment and wrapping (which breaks highlighting), note sections which look like they should be formatted differently but aren't, etc. I would encourage the authors and/or publisher to work on these flaws and release an update. If such an update is released I will happily re-visit my review.

The book is good and in very detail.

Es habitual que se utilicen nombres muy presuntuosos en este tipo de libros, sin embargo, este sí hace honor al título: realmente es la guía definitiva sobre el lenguaje CSS. Dos de las autoridades más respetadas en el lenguaje CSS te van explicando minuciosamente todos los entresijos de las hojas de estilos. La narración es precisa y detallada pero fácil de entender. Todos los puntos que resultan algo retorcidos o confusos están reforzados con un abundante número de ejemplos llenos de imágenes e ilustraciones. El libro está muy bien estructurado. Se puede leer de principio a fin o saltar entre los capítulos a voluntad. Se incluyen muchas referencias cruzadas para ampliar información cuando se hace referencia a algo que ya ha sido explicado o viceversa. Personalmente es un libro que me ha ayudado muchísimo a entender ciertos detalles y asuntos que siempre me daban problemas (aparentemente inexplicables, pero que no lo eran). Para cada capítulo, no hay nada que se quede sin tocar. Por ejemplo, los autores no dudan en utilizar unas 110 páginas solo para explicar las propiedades relacionadas con el texto y las fuentes. Pese a ello, como ya dicho, es relativamente ameno y no se hace nada pesado (si tienes interés en conocer los detalles, claro está). Se incluyen aspectos avanzados como el flex box, grid layout, table layout, transforms, transiciones, animaciones, etc. Lo recomiendo a todo el que busque un conocimiento sólido y profundo de las hojas de estilo. No creo que se haya escrito nada igual. He tenido algunos otros libros de CSS y no servían para nada.

An amazing book from Meyer, as usual. This book contains everything you need to know about CSS and it's explained very well, I can't recommend any other book about CSS more than this. If you had the previous book (CSS 2.1) from Meyer you will find this quite different. This book contains way more examples and an easier language than the previous one. Warning: This is not a beginner book. You can understand it as a beginner but the amount of information might be overwhelming

A great reference book.

je suis plutôt difficile au niveau des livres techniques, et celui-ci est un incroyable travail de digestion des documents de référence techniques correspondants à chaque fonctionnalité du CSS : quasi exhaustif (à la date de 2017) avec des exemples très clairs, et tout cela avec une bonne dose d'humour. On ne peut que s'incliner devant le travail des 2 auteurs. Si j'ai acheté cette édition en ebook, j'achèterai définitivement la prochaine édition - que j'attends avec impatience - en version papier pour la garder sur mon bureau.