The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5)

learning CSS

can any one recommend any good books and web resources?

thanks

eddy
Monday, April 19, 2004

O'Reilly.

Mr Jack
Monday, April 19, 2004

In this order:

http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp
http://css.maxdesign.com.au/selectutorial/
http://css.maxdesign.com.au/floatutorial/
http://css.maxdesign.com.au/listutorial/

John Topley (www.johntopley.com)
Monday, April 19, 2004

There's a really good reference at http://www.zvon.org/xxl/CSS2Reference/Output/index.html once you get up and running. In fact there are a lot of really useful references on that site.

R1ch
Monday, April 19, 2004

Also, check out http://www.csszengarden.com for some great examples. Take a look at their CSS Resources link as well and you will end up at a lot of excellent places.

Here is one of the links from their resources section that is very useful for learning CSS:

http://www.westciv.com/style_master/academy/css_tutorial/index.html

Good luck, I just walked down this same path :)

Seeker
Monday, April 19, 2004

http://www.alistapart.com
http://www.thenoodleincident.com/
http://www.webproducer.at/flexible-layout
http://www.mezzoblue.com/css/cribsheet/

Joe Hendricks
Monday, April 19, 2004

Eric Meyer has written some excellent books (one is just being released) on designing with CSS. Zeldman's Designing with Web Standards doesn't solely focus on CSS, but it is a good way to walk into XHTML + CSS if you've been living with nested tables and hard coded values for a long time.

Lou
Monday, April 19, 2004

in addition to all the fine resources listed so far, the best way to really learn CSS it is to take whatever you're reading about and try to *do it*. It's hard and frustrating at first, but it's the only way you ever get a handle on it.

eaw
Monday, April 19, 2004

Oh, and don't use IE as your "first look" browser. Use something else, like Mozilla or Firefox or Opera. There's so many quirks and bugs in the IE CSS support, that if you use IE as your first look, you're bound to end up with IE-specific CSS. If you start with a browser that's more standards compliant, then you can just tweak the few things that are wrong in IE (most notably, the broken box model in IE/Win 5.x).

Oh, and MOST IMPORTANT: start with a standards compliance indicating DOCTYPE, like:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

If you don't have this, then Mozilla and IE go into "buggy as hell previous browsers suck" mode, and you'll go crazy trying to get things to work everywhere. :)

Brad Wilson (dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com)
Monday, April 19, 2004

Web resource:
http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp

Book:
"DHTML and CSS for the world wide web"
by Jason Cranford Teague

Sammy So-What
Monday, April 19, 2004

Firefox with the Edit CSS extension [1] is just fantastic. You can open up any page, see what CSS it's using and modify that CSS in a separate pane to see the results in the actual page. All on the fly.

[1] http://texturizer.net/firefox/extensions/#editcss

Chris Winters
Monday, April 19, 2004

On the subject of not using IE... I'd recommend previewing in both IE and Firefox constantly. Don't just rely on one for too long, you're going to build up to many problems you won't be able to make head or tail of.

EditCSS on Firefox is good, yep, but it doesn't work too well if you're using an @import to get your stylesheet in. (you'd have to cut'n'paste)

Joel Goodwin
Monday, April 19, 2004

> EditCSS on Firefox is good

Yes, this is a great tool (plugin) that lets you edit the CSS and see the changes live in the browser. Of course... You'll still have to check in IE, but those are the breaks.

www.MarkTAW.com
Tuesday, April 20, 2004

thank you for all the resources.

much appreciated.

eddy
Tuesday, April 20, 2004

You don't need a book. Work through this:

http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/css/

It's very clear and easy, at least if you already know regular HTML.

Junkster
Thursday, April 22, 2004