Review: The CSS3 Anthology: Take Your Sites to New Heights

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The CSS3 Anthology: Take Your Sites to New Heights by Rachel Andrew is from SitePoint (2012). This is the 4th edition of this popular book, so you may be familiar with how it works. In case you are not, the book uses a question and answer type of organization. You might have a question such as, “How do I create rollover images in my navigation without using JavaScript?” The book suggests the question, then provides the answer. The answer includes screen shots, both HTML and CSS code examples and some discussion as to how the solution works and how it might be modified.

The title makes no mention of HTML5, but many (not all) the HTML code examples in the book have been updated to HTML5.

The book is organized into chapters, with the questions and answers in each chapter fairly well described by the chapter title, although on one or two occasions I wondered why they chose a particular chapter to explain something. Chapters cover broad topics like CSS basics, text, images, navigation, tabular data, forms, positioning and layout. There’s also a very good chapter on cross-browser techniques.

Chapter names aside, if I were looking for an answer, I would start with the index. For example, when you look for “opacity” in the index, you find it mentioned on 7 different pages. To find the solution I wanted regarding opacity, I would check those 7 pages.

If you are looking for quick solutions to your CSS3 questions, this book probably has them. You’ll find background gradients, multiple backgrounds, text-shadow, box shadow, multicolumn layouts, various polyfils, media queries, transforms, opacity, RGBa transparency, and more included.

I’m not sure this is the book you want to read straight through to learn CSS, but it definitely is a book you would find valuable in implementing new CSS3 properties into your website. And you can learn a lot from reading it straight through, should you do that.

Summary: Easy to use resource with answers to your CSS3 questions.

A review by Virginia DeBolt of The CSS3 Anthology: Take Your Sites to New Heights (rating: 5 stars)

Disclosure: SitePoint provided a review copy of this book, but my opinions are my own.

One thought on “Review: The CSS3 Anthology: Take Your Sites to New Heights”

  1. This is actually the book I want to read, for it sounds like a great guide in helping me learn CSS. I will have to get it, and I am so glad you shared.

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