Programmer Musings

Review of CSS Cookbook

CSS Cookbook
Christopher Schmitt
O'Reilly, 2004

This has become my new favorite book on CSS.

For quite some time, the only way to learn to use CSS in website design was search the web for references, keep CSS: The Definitive Guide by your side, and experiment. The problem is that the interactions with the different browsers is a mess and not everybody thinks in the CSS model.

This book helps on both fronts. The recipes in the book each have a section in the discussion that describe various browser incompatibilities and their workarounds. There is also a full chapter devoted to the workarounds. More importantly, the author handles each recipe by telling you how to solve your problem correctly, and then explains how to make the minimal changes necessary to deal with browser incompatibilities.

Unlike a few books I've seen in the cookbook style, the CSS Cookbook does it right. Each recipe starts with a problem you might want to solve on your site and walks you through solving that problem. Some of the recipes give multiple solutions and describe some tradeoffs, so you can decide which is right for you.

The book isn't perfect, I found a couple of grammar mistakes that should have been caught in editing and the last figure of chapter 8 is missing. Overall, it seems to be a really good effort.

If you are doing any web design work, I would highly recommend this book. I plan to be using some of the recipes to clean up a few things on my site that I didn't get quite right.