Anyone who has ever seen Andy present will probably have already bought this book, so this review is for everyone else. The book is inspirational. Just like the stage show. Last year we were treated to some great CSS books for beginners and it was cool to finish the year off with a book for the rest of us. Not to say this book isn’t for beginners but it’s emphasis is more on getting out of the inevitable comfort zones we settle into as CSS developers rather than covering the basics of syntax and how to make an unordered list go across the page.

Divided into four sections, Andy first talks up his transcendent CSS philosophy with its “content-out” approach, use of a greater range of CSS selectors including CSS3, using JavaScript and the DOM to plug the gaps in CSS and generally not working to the lowest common denominator but adding progressive enhancement for those users of modern browsers. In the section on Process the reader is offered some thoughts on workflow, wireframing and interactive prototyping before putting the principles into practice. True to the book’s word, all the examples are best viewed in a modern browser—this is not an exercise in bulletproof design—that’s left for us to do naturally, particularly undoing or not implementing Andy’s choice of using JavaScript to clear a float.

The third section was the meat of this food-inspired book on CSS. Note: do not read this when hungry or on a diet, the full-bleed, gorgeous photos of food can overwhelm the weak of will. Dealing with Inspiration Andy looks outside the Web at newspapers and magazines as well as at websites for examples of grid-based designs and how to bring these ideas together in new ways. The reader is introduced to mood boards and scrapbooks and asked to (re)examine Flash as well as seek out typographic inspiration. With Windows Vista now out, I noted that Andy’s examples were using the new Vista fonts as a first choice—and why not? By coincidence I read this chapter on the train journey to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and it certainly made me view the art collection in a completely different light. Hey! I’m supposed to be a developer, not a designer… I guess the chapter and the book must be working then.

The book concludes with Transcendence—a look at the various positioning methods and CSS3. Personally, I can’t wait for widespread support for the Backgrounds and Borders Module and watching the presentation of the book at the upcoming Future of Web Design conference.

A bookshelf essential.

★★★★★ Stars

Buy “Transcending CSS” now from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com or Amazon.ca.

Foreword of the Year, 2006 goes to Andy Clarke for getting Logan’s Run and Battlestar Galactica into a book on Cascading Style Sheets. But rather than take a walk down memory lane with Maya I suppose I should start a review of Simon Collison’s “Beginning CSS Web Development” book.

The book is divided into two parts with Colly first introducing the reader to the basics of CSS before moving on to an in-depth look at layouts, usability and accessibility enhancements, tips and troubleshooting and the obligatory (great looking) case study. Chapter 1 — Getting Started soon enters a reasonably meaty discussion on maintaining and organising style sheets that intermediate and even advanced practitioners might also find of interest. We all have our little ways of organising our files and Colly introduces the beginner to multiple directories under that one css folder we normally only ever have (come on admit it!), modular CSS, CSS syntax, commenting and indenting as well as reusing style sheets for other devices. From a teaching perspective it was good to see some best practices being introduced right from the start — page 9 to be precise. The next chapter looks at IDs and classes, how to use the cascade (or not), grouping, inheritence, contextual selectors and CSS measurements (pixels, percent and ems). Again, a good foundation chapter for beginners here — too often we see font-family defined for every heading or a class put on every list item when an id on the <ul> was all that was required. The reader is also informed about grouping similar styles into one rule to achieve nice, compact code. I’m not sure if CSS measurements belonged in chapter 2 but by the end of it a novice would be well-informed on how to organise their style sheets and get the most out of them in as few lines as possible.

After attending Dave Shea’s “Typography for the Web” presentation at @media2006 I enjoyed the recap (as it was for me) concerning text offered in chapter 4 — an increasing area of interest for myself as the font choices are rather limited at the moment. Chapters 5 and 6 cover images and lists respectively, chapter 7 covers links — always, always style a:active and a:focus for keyboard accessibility please and chapter 8 introduces “HTML Element of the Year 2006″: The Definition List. How many times have I used this on projects this year? I’ve found it to be quite versatile but keep a semantic eye on it also.

The very last chapter of part 1 deals with forms. Lovely, lovely forms. When you’ve had to apply accessibility retrospectively to about 10 large forms you’ll understand my pain. Colly dedicates 30-odd pages to teaching novices how to mark them up and style them. I would have preferred to see things like selected="selected" mentioned for select elements and was disappointed by the accesskeys entry under “Accessibility Aids”. Unless user-assigned, accesskeys are a no-no.

Part two is where you really start to roll up your sleeves and have fun. Colly offers some great discussion on floats, clearing and different types of layout before building some basic two and three-column layouts (if you’re pushed for time, you can download the code snippets by the way). Chapter 12 covers contextual selectors e.g. using an ID on the body tag to really gain control of your styles on a per-page basis and reveals the secret behind equal height columns (i.e. faux columns). Some further tips and tricks are offered in chapter 15 and then it’s on to the finale of the case study.

It’s been a great year for people wanting to learn CSS. There’s “Bulletproof Web Design” by Dan Cederholm, “CSS Mastery” by Andy Budd, Cameron Moll and Colly and now this book. This is the penultimate book on CSS I’m buying, after transcending CSS that’s it for me. The topic has been done and done well.

★★★★★ Stars