Finally, CSS Demystified

If you’re a programmer type like me and have tried your hand at CSS, it’s very likely you’ve struggled like I have to understand how CSS really works. As I programmer, I’m used to writing code while visualizing in my head what the outcome of running the code is going to be (ignoring all those nasty bugs of course :-) ). However, with CSS, I was never able to get the feeling that I knew exactly what was going to happen when a page rendered. All the books I read until recently did not really help me – it seemed like the authors of the books were also as confused as I was as to how things exactly worked. The tone of the books was – “if you are looking for X, here is the CSS that does it”; well if you are not looking for X, tough luck :-(

All in all, CSS was a bit of a dark art until I recently read CSS : The Missing Manual.

This is an outstanding CSS book! It really explains how things really work with CSS. After reading the book, I’ve actually been able to write CSS and have the page turn out as I visualized in my head. The book is well worth the money just for the chapter on page layouts – very well explained. Now if only I could pick some decent colors and fonts to go with all those cool layouts …

One Response to “Finally, CSS Demystified”

  1. Sudd Ghosh says:

    Hi Shankar,
    This is your old classmate Ghosh. I have the same experience with CSS as you. These days I need to work/struggle a lot with CSS and find it very time consuming. Thanks for the book info. I found a couple of good references, but not exactly a book.

    http://www.devguru.com/technologies/css2/home.asp
    http://www.w3schools.com/Css/default.asp
    This has some advanced stuffs:
    http://www.csszengarden.com/

    Regards to you and family, Ghosh
    Sudd Ghosh
    suddhasatwa_ghosh@yahoo.com

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