CSS Cookbook, Second Edition

In late 2006, my new book, the second edition of CSS Cookbook, came out by O’Reilly. While the CSS Cookbook provides hundreds of practical examples with CSS code recipes that you can use immediately to format your web pages, I’d like to point out some of the other positives from this updated edition:

1. Expanded. Coming in at 538 pages, the second edition is almost twice as large as the first edition.
2. Revised and Updated. The book didn’t just add more pages to the previous edition. Not one chapter went untouched in the second edition. While we added more to the book, some recipes were thrown away if it was deemed out of date (like the hybrid, HTML table layout).
3. New Chapters. Also included are two new chapters: one chapter geared for general CSS knowledge to help the beginners and another chapter for techniques centered on images.
4. Bears. On the cover is the Grizzly Bear. TV star Stephen Colbert states that the Grizzly Bear is one of those “godless killing machines without a soul”. Sounds like all the backup you need to squash bugs, the web development kind and any cockroaches your girlfriend finds in the bathroom.
5. Form Elements. Web forms makes the ecommerce world go ‘round. So knowing how a form element will or won’t be affected by CSS properties becomes paramount to any Web designer. That’s why I included in the second edition an appendix dedicated to detailing how form elements were affected by CSS properties.

   Screenshots showing how 20 CSS properties on eight form elements (checkboxes, file upload elements, radio buttons, text fields, multiple options, select elements, submit buttons, and text areas) were affected by in ten modern browsers (Windows Internet Explorer 5, 5.5, 6, and 7; Mac Safari 2; Windows and Mac Firefox 1.5; Windows and Mac Netscape Navigator 7.2; and Opera 8.5).

   In all over 1,600 screen captures were taken to get this job done.due to printing costs, the entire 160 page appendix had to be reduced to make room for other parts of the book, …like chapters one through ten. 

   Thanks to the phenom known as the World Wide Web, such physical limitations are mere annoyances. Therefore O’Reilly has graciously allowed the unedited 160 page version to be downloaded from their web site.

6. Code Download. With a book that goes through code samples like they were going out of style, the new edition organizes the code in a much more orderly fashion. Now you can find the code sample as easily as you an find the recipe in the book.
7. Thud. It seems like there are dozens of books coming out every month all geared at helping Web designers and developers make a better Web experience. That’s why I was floored when the editors at The Designers Bookshelf honored the CSS Cookbook, Second edition, as The Web Design Book of the Year.