GET IT GET IT GET IT! This is becoming my mantra for any book that I rate 4 stars and above. Pro CSS and HTML Design Patterns is no different. I would buy this book again and again if I kept losing it that is how valuable this book is. In fact, I would buy two copies and stow one in a safe to quickly retrieve if I lost the other. I LOVE THIS BOOK!

Why? Well it is easy to see that the trend on the Internet is continuing to push further and further into defining pages with CSS and using HTML as your structural code. CSS allows us designers to break out of the rigidity and frustrations that HTML tables had captured us in for so long. But as we began to experiment with CSS we found that while it is incredibly intuitive it does after all require a whole new way of thinking and designing. And it requires a specificity that HTML could never quite offer. These really are the pros and cons of CSS.

Now, as CSS has grown in popularity and usage more and more books have cropped up in support of its use and shown people the very basics of how to design pages with CSS. Unfortunately, however the books have either been too complex or two simple and thus have never been as helpful as they propose.

This book, on the other hand, from the very beginning describes CSS in ways that the beginning user can grasp but also bring a more experienced scripter to further enlightenment. It does an excellent job at chunking the information into usable bites that one can “code on the fly” and use as a quick reference. In many ways it feels more like a CSS dictionary for creating a beautiful website all with the power of CSS.

The book itself is comprised of 20 chapters that could have easily been combined into sections. However, this “kernalization” of content serves the purpose of being very easy to reference and thus adds to the effectiveness of the book. The introduction makes the claim that “This is a solutions book for styling HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.1 with CSS 2.1. It contains more than 350 design patterns you can put to use right away. Each design pattern is modular and customizable, and you can combine patterns to create an unlimited number of designs.” This is true and justified in the layout of the book.

Chapter 1- 3: Making CSS Easy! / HTML Design Patterns / CSS Selectors and Inheritance

As said before this book contains valuable information for both the novice and the seasoned veteran. Even after having a few years of CSS under my belt it was nice to see someone making efforts at clarifying the details in such a way that will help you write cleaner code. Furthermore, the explanation on CSS syntax is invaluable. Throughout this unit and the rest of the book the author strives not only to explain but also provide usable and useful references to use on your own web pages. One of my favorite things that I like to see tech writers do is write to help an audience immediately rather than providing abstract examples of difficult code that don’t translate well to your own work. This book does a fabulous job at continuing to speak to the designer and provide them with new tools.

Its discussion on HTML Design patters and CSS Selectors and Inheritance also makes difficult topics easy to understand by providing clear and usable examples. This repeatedly is where this book excels.

Chapter 4-6: Box Models / Box Model Extents/ Box Model Properties

I really enjoyed working through these units because these begin the building of your knowledge on how to create columnar layouts in CSS. This of course at this point is minus the important positioning elements that help create the 3-column layout so loved by web designers. Nonetheless you get ample discussion of shrink-wrapping, inline boxes, block boxes, table boxes almost ad nausea. As I stated before some of these units could have been combined into one large chapter. However it would have been much more difficult to find content. The box model ends on an very important discussion of margins, background and overflow. These are some of the most vital units in the book.

Unit 7-9 Positioning Models

The next most important discussion in this book has to be these three chapters. Positioning has to be one of the trickiest things in CSS and this book makes it easy as pie while also sending you home with some immediately useable content and content that is exceptionally memorable. Discussion on the dreaded float and clear descriptors cleared up some long misconstrued understandings I had in regards to those elements. This was a welcome refresher but also a welcome addition to my body of knowledge for CSS.

Unit 10-20

The final half of the book is really devoted to styling elements which will help you to create more attractive pages by providing pages with text shadows and decorations and other elements designed to create a better visual impression for your web page visitors. Aspects such as spacing and aligning content are covered and show how far the web has come in regards to how we can position text and objects almost anywhere on the page without having to use spacer images anymore. What a relief.

There is also an important discussion regarding images and special effects that you can apply to them. By Unit 15 we revisit the world of tables but in the CSS way and find out how powerful CSS really can be in helping to create perfectly aligned data in your tables and also how to easily create striped tables without a lot of fuss. The final units deal with column layouts which are especially helpful for new designers not wanting to use tables. There are also tutorials on how to create CSS fly out menus which are really cool. Drop Caps are discussed as well as Callouts and quotes and finally Alarms and warnings.

This book really condenses an incredible amount of CSS code in between the pages and provides you with a great deal of usable content far and beyond what many other CSS books offer. I would say without a doubt if you purchase any book on CSS this year then get this one.