Book Review – CSS: The Missing Manual by David Sawyer McFarland - Page 2

Part three, "Page Layout", deals with the placement of elements on a page. Here you learn how to create common designs. The author also deals with topics such as floats and positioning, as well as adding sidebars.

Part four is called "Advanced CSS." This section covers general techniques for using CSS more effectively. Finally, the appendix gives the reader extra resources. The CSS property reference provides summaries so you can quickly learn about each property. Other resources cover tools and resources, as well as books and web sites.

Generally, this series of books is extraordinary in the clarity of its languages and ideas. Likewise, it's simply the quality of presentation that makes this book so usable.

For example, in section two ("Applied CSS"), the author describes the “box model”. While I understand the concept of this model, I don’t think that I could have described it in the simple, no-nonsense way McFarland does. But the idea that a tag is simply a box with something inside it makes so much sense. He explains the importance to the presentation of your content of how these boxes interact to present the margins, text and padding.

With so many books on CSS, why would you want this one? Because it truly teaches the correct method of working with style sheets. It can take you from the very basic to the very sophisticated in a reasonably short time. From his methodology it seems that David McFarland, a developer by trade, is a teacher by vocation. That certainly comes across in his style and writing. If you were to buy only one book on CSS, CSS: The Missing Manual should be it.

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