Case Study NOT How To | The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web (Voices That Matter)

Let's review, one more time | The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web (Voices That Matter) | Dave Shea, Molly E. Holzschlag

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	• The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web (Voices That Matter) Dave Shea, Molly E. Holzschlag Peachpit Press, 2005 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 87 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Coolest book ever ... well close anyway!!

I bought this book hoping for a CSS tutorial from the Grand Masters of CSS themselves. Instead what I read was better. This book is more of a concept book than anything. There are a few little tutorial things, but for the most part they talk about the concepts behind CSS design. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is getting into CSS. You should probably know something about CSS before reading this though.

Case Study NOT How To

What most of the negative reviewers of this title seem to not realize is that this is not a "HOW TO" book. If you want a book to learn CSS, there are plenty of better choices. This is a case study book of one web site, the process from beginning to end. This is a designer's notebook on a project.

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Let's review, one more time

This is important to understand: this is not a book that will teach you the fundamentals of CSS. Repeat, NOT a primer on CSS. Rather, it is a book aimed at users who want to write or improve the aesthetics of their website by incorporating CSS. For that reason, it is fairly solid. Most of the premises are fairly basic and straightforward, covering the usual elements of type, layout, images, grids, etc. It is a decent resource for ideas and perhaps some alternative ways to approach building or rebuilding your site (using CSS presumably). Advanced designers would probably want to look elsewhere for ideas, theories and techniques.

If you want to understand what CSS is really about, in terms of writing it (to make your site as pretty as the examples in this book) you should turn elsewhere, like Eric A. Meyer's book on the subject. And you can easily check out the publisher's website and probably see everything you need to that is in this book.

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Beautiful, useful book

I've been reading (and reviewing) mostly business books lately. I picked up The Zen of CSS design because it was pretty and because I design my own business web sites. Mostly because it was pretty.

Having read about the CSS Zen Garden and seen the sites in The Zen of CSS Design, it would be more fitting to say I build my own web sites. Where I use a cold chisel and a sledgehammer, these guys use a feather and a dab of India ink and create multi-colored, multi-faceted sites. Okay, they don't literally use a feather and ink, but I don't literally use a cold chisel, either.

If, as a business person, you design your own web sites or want to, take a look at The Zen of CSS Design.

If, on the other hand, you love to look at great sites but have no interest in creating them, look at it in the bookstore or check it out of the library. It's a beautiful book.

The Zen of CSS Design is a designer's book, not a programmer's book. You do need a basic understanding of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), but there are scads of good books on CSS and you can read one concurrently with Zen and learn as you go.

If you are at all interested in creating attractive, standards-based web sites, you will learn more from this book than any other single volume I've looked at. Granted, as I said it doesn't cover the very basic, beginning stuff, but it goes one better. It shows CSS in action, doing really amazing things.

The whole book is based on one web site. The HTML code is exactly the same on every rendition of the site. The actual sites couldn't be more different, and it's all done with CSS. It's truly remarkable.

I'm taking up the challenge and starting my own attempt at the site. I'm sure it will never be good enough to submit to the CSS Zen Garden, but it's a fun project (like I needed another one) and a good learning experience. By the time I finish or give up, I'll know more about CSS than I can imagine now.

This is a great design book and a great coffee table book, in one. Check it out if you're into web design at all, even if you think you're not into CSS. You might change your mind.

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