The CSS Anthology - 101 Essential Tips, Tricks, Hacks

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Review

Chapter 1 - Getting started with CSS
Chapter one is a whirlwind trip through the very ground work of CSS design. It start of with coverage of the different was of defining CSS styles. The author covers inline styles, embedded styles as well as external style sheets.
Next we move onto CSS selectors, one of the really basic but really powerful features of CSS. Covered here is type selectors, class selectors, id selectors, descendant and child selectors as well as pseudo selectors.

Chapter 2 - Text Styling and Other Basics
As the title indicates this chapter is all about styling text. So here is where the book starts to follow the format it will follow for the rest of the book. The format is as follows, question followed by a solution and depending on the complexity of the problem a discussion of the solution.
In this chapter questions such as how to replace the <font> tag, what the best sizing method is for fonts, is it pixel, points, em's or something else. Other topics are, how to style the first item in a list differently from the rest, adding a background color to a heading, styling a horizontal rule, adding comments to CSS files and much more.

Chapter 3 - CSS and Images
This chapter is all about CSS and images and hopes to lie to rest the old belief that sites designed with CSS are boring and that to design true standards based websites you need to swear of images for good. The author starts of with simple techniques such as how to add borders to an image, adding a background image to your page as well as other elements such as headings and lists. The author moves on to items such as adding more then one background image to a document as well as using transparent images.

Chapter 4 - Navigation
This is probably one of the aspects of designing websites for which CSS has been used the most and a topic that has been discussed a lot. In this chapter the author gives her take on this important topic. She discussed topics such as replacing image based navigation with CSS and styling a structured list as a navigation menu. Other topics discussed are creating tabbed navigation as well as creating CSS based image roll over navigation, a topic I really enjoyed.

Chapter 5 - Tabular Data
Next up is tables, a topic that has caused many heated discussions. In this chapter the author discusses how to use tables correctly and how to use CSS to create stunning, functional tables. The discussion on displaying spreadsheet data in an attractive and useable way was very interesting and useful.
Ever wondered how to change a cell's background color when the pointer hovers over it? Well you will find the answer in this chapter. There is also a very nice solution to displaying a calendar using CSS. All and all this is a very good chapter with lots off reusable code examples.

Chapter 6 - Forms and User Interfaces
This is truly a very large topic and the author does well to cover a lot of ground in just one chapter. A very nice topic that is covered here is how to ensure that users with text-only devices understand how to complete your forms. Other interesting topics are how to lay out a two-column form using CSS instead of tables, grouping related fields, highlighting form fields when the it gets focus and much more.

Chapter 7 - Cross-browser Techniques
A very important topic and one that is unfortunately still a thorn in every developers side. The author covers aspects such as how to test in various browsers on one operating system, installing multiple versions of Internet Explorer, hiding CSS from a particular browser and achieving alpha transparency in Internet Explorer 6.
The author also covers DOCTYPE switching and what to do when you think you have found a bug! Here she cites many useful resources such as Position Is Everything, the css-discuss mailing list and the CSS Pointers Group.

Chapter 8 - Accessibility and Alternative Devices
In this chapter the author introduces you to many tools and useful plug-ins to specifically Firefox. Also covered are creating print style sheets, something I find particularly useful. Another topic that is equally useful is adding alternate style sheets to your document and how to accomplish style sheet switching.

Chapter 9 - CSS Positioning and Layout
This is a great chapter for all those developers that wish to move away from table based layout to pure CSS layouts. The author discusses how the box model works with regards to padding and margins and the quirks in Internet Explorer 6 in this regard. How do you make text wrap around an image with CSS? The answer is right here as well as how to stop the element from floating after a floated block using clear.
The chapter closes with a discussion of the various layouts used on today's websites such as two and three column layouts as well as the elusive liquid layout, CSS image galleries and rounded corners.