Information Technology Dark Side

I’ve never felt skilled when it came to crafting the look and feel of an application. There were two components to my feelings of inadequacy: 1) Not understanding CSS and 2) Not being terribly artistic.

The CSS Anthology has really gotten me past #1, and as a result I’m discovering that I am better than I thought at making a web site look good.

Here’s what I like about this book:

It starts with the basics.
I think a lot of my struggles with CSS were the result of never learning the basics. The first chapter of Anthology, “Making a Start with CSS” was really very helpful to me. It filled in the gaps of what I had guessed by hacking at CSS with a much better grasp of what CSS does and how styles get assigned to elements. It was a mini-course in remedial CSS, and I really needed it.

It gets progressively more complex.
I really found the way the recipes got progressively more complex throughout the book helped me to learn effectively. Perhaps this is because I’ve always been such a CSS hack, but the learning increments from chapter to chapter were just the right size. I read the book on an airplane and found I could grok it all the way through.

It’s a cookbook with a strong index.
Want to know how to make a box with round corners? Or remove the default styling from an unordered list? Anthology answers 101 questions like this, and I’ve found the index is very useful for finding solutions for the problems I encountered as I worked on re-designing TroopTrack.com.

If you’re feeling weak with CSS, get this book. It’s really very good.

Stumble it!