Best Books for Learning CSS and HTML
After reading Empress' post about learning more about CSS, I couldn't agree more. Anybody who's interested in building websites should learn "the basics" of Cascading Style Sheets. And if you want to go beyond the most basic website designs, you need to go beyond the basics and learn how to use style-sheets to maximum advantage.
The whole point of CSS is to separate the content and the design of your website. That means when you want to change the way the site looks, you just change the stylesheet, without having to touch the content of your site. To see what I'm talking about, pop over to the CSS Zen Garden and click on the links on the right-hand side, under "select a design." The changes are amazing, but all that's happening is that different stylesheets are being used to display the same content.
I'm a fairly low-skill CSS hacker myself. I can take an existing stylesheet and tweak it here and there to change some colors or fonts, or to make a column wider, but that's about as far as it goes. But like Empress, I'm keen to learn more.
There are some great websites that can help you learn about CSS, but if you're serious about getting good info, I suggest buying a book or two. That's a lesson I first learned with HTML. I've been building websites since 1995 (you'd think I would've gotten better at it by now) and I've always kept a few HTML reference sites in my bookmarks. Never gave a thought to buying a book about HTML. Then I had to buy one as a textbook. That was five years ago, and I can't count the number of times that book has come in handy when I was stuck.
Sure, I could've loaded an HTML reference site in another browser window, but sometimes it's easier to do it the old-fashioned way and pull a book off the shelf and find the information you're looking for.
For all you'll ever need to know about cascading stylesheets, the books I recommend are CSS: The Definitive Guide
or The Zen of CSS Design.
And if you don't have an HTML reference book sitting on your bookshelf, I'd recommend either HTML, XHTML, and CSS, Sixth Edition (this is the newest edition of the one I bought as a textbook) or HTML: the Definitive Guide.
The whole point of CSS is to separate the content and the design of your website. That means when you want to change the way the site looks, you just change the stylesheet, without having to touch the content of your site. To see what I'm talking about, pop over to the CSS Zen Garden and click on the links on the right-hand side, under "select a design." The changes are amazing, but all that's happening is that different stylesheets are being used to display the same content.
I'm a fairly low-skill CSS hacker myself. I can take an existing stylesheet and tweak it here and there to change some colors or fonts, or to make a column wider, but that's about as far as it goes. But like Empress, I'm keen to learn more.
There are some great websites that can help you learn about CSS, but if you're serious about getting good info, I suggest buying a book or two. That's a lesson I first learned with HTML. I've been building websites since 1995 (you'd think I would've gotten better at it by now) and I've always kept a few HTML reference sites in my bookmarks. Never gave a thought to buying a book about HTML. Then I had to buy one as a textbook. That was five years ago, and I can't count the number of times that book has come in handy when I was stuck.
Sure, I could've loaded an HTML reference site in another browser window, but sometimes it's easier to do it the old-fashioned way and pull a book off the shelf and find the information you're looking for.
For all you'll ever need to know about cascading stylesheets, the books I recommend are CSS: The Definitive Guide
or The Zen of CSS Design.And if you don't have an HTML reference book sitting on your bookshelf, I'd recommend either HTML, XHTML, and CSS, Sixth Edition
(this is the newest edition of the one I bought as a textbook) or HTML: the Definitive Guide.
