| In our wonderful world of web design, there are 3,647 ways to accomplish the same goal. Approximately. And that absurdly fictitious number is increasing every day. Instead of one, correct way of solving a particular problem, we’re both blessed and cursed by the abundant choices we have as web designers. It’s these choices that make designing for the Web fun and interesting, while at the same time overwhelming. CSS Mastery will help cure that overwhelmingitis (a word that I’ve just invented).
CSS Mastery is aimed at anybody with a basic knowledge of (X)HTML and CSS. If you have just recently dipped your toes into the world of CSS design, or if you’ve been developing pure CSS sites for years, there will be something in this book for you. However, you will get the most out of this book if you have been using CSS for a while but don’t consider yourself a master just yet. This book is packed full of practical, real-world advice and examples, to help you master modern CSS design.
There are an increasing number of CSS resources around, yet you only have to look at a CSS mailing list to see the same questions popping up time and again. “How do I center a design?” “What is the best rounded-corner box technique?” “How do I create a three-column layout?” If you follow the CSS design community, it is usually a case of remembering which website a particular article or technique is featured on. However, if you are relatively new to CSS, or don’t have the time to read all the blogs, this information can be hard to track down.
Then there are the browsers to contend with. Browser bugs and inconsistencies are one of the biggest problems for the modern CSS developer. Unfortunately, many of these bugs are poorly documented and their fixes verge on the side of folk law. You know that you have to do something a certain way or it will break in one browser or another. You just can’t remember which browser or how it breaks.
So the idea for a book formed. A book that brings together the most useful CSS techniques in one place, that focuses on real-world browser issues and that helps plug common gaps in people’s CSS knowledge. A book that will help you jump the learning curve and have you coding like a CSS expert in no time flat.
About the Author
Andy Budd is a user experience designer and web standards developer living and working in Brighton, England. As the creative director of web design consultancy Clearleft (www.clearleft.com), Andy enjoys building attractive, accessible, and standards-compliant websites. His online home can be found at www.andybudd.com, where he writes about modern web design practices.
Andy is a regular speaker at international design conferences, workshops, and training events, and organized the UK’s first web 2.0 conference (www.dconstruct.org). Passionate about the quality of education in the industry, Andy runs SkillSwap (www.skillswap.org), a free community training and networking project. Andy also helped set up the Web Standards Awards (www.webstandardsawards.com), a project that aims to recognize websites for their use of web standards.
When he’s not building websites, Andy is a keen travel photographer. Never happier than when he’s diving some remote tropical atoll, Andy is also a qualified PADI dive instructor and retired shark wrangler. |
