I’ve always enjoyed reading books that challenge your thinking and motivate you to be better at what you do. One area of web design I really have a passion to improve on is CSS or Cascading Style Sheets.
Recently I purchased Transcending CSS by Andy Clarke. Andy has been involved in web design for over ten years, runs his own design studio and contributes in many web standards workshops and conferences all around the world.
Transcending CSS by Andy Clarke
I really think Andy has created a excellent book which is very motivating and inspirational. This book is really well presented with beautiful images inspiring your design thoughts, challenges you to create cutting edge CSS layouts with accessibility and degrading gracefully with older browsers with less CSS support, challenges you not to use hacks and filters in your CSS code providing practical alternatives, and creates an enthusiasm to create better websites than you have ever done before regardless of your skill level.
You will also learn to truly separate visual design from layout and use the power of CSS to create rich semantically structured design that conforms to web standards. Transcending CSS gives you practical processes to streamline your design time and implement time saving techniques developed by professionals in the industry in a real studio environment.
Not really a book for beginners who are still working with table layouts or wanting to learn CSS, but those who have some basic knowledge of CSS and have designed websites, or for advanced CSS users who want to set higher standards in their work.
If your passionate about CSS then you can’t go past this book. I already have a few books on CSS in my bookshelf and this is my pick of the bunch to date.
Edit: As of the 1st of January 2007 this book was listed as No 6 on Amazon’s bestselling book about Scripting and Programming.
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Many thanks for your kind words about the book, I am so glad that you like it.
Hello Malarkey! I feel privileged to have you drop into my site.
I’m still working through the book and the more I read the more motivated I become to aim higher with design. I’ve even started a new design to update my own site and I’ll be implementing as many of your techniques as I can. Thanks for contributing such a great book to the design community.
A bonus of following your books techniques are that they lend themselves to support good search engine optimisation practices which is a bonus for any web site owner.
This book does exactly what the title says: it transcends CSS. His book is both motivational and inspiring to read. He challenges us as developers to really move forward, and points us in a logical direction. His writing style is nice in that he doesn’t dwell on anything for too long, just gives great examples, advice, and direction.
I imagine this book will rank rather high in Amazon, I know I personally feel it was the best book (on CSS) that I read in the past year.
I was fortunate to attend Andy’s conference once and it is sufficient to say “he really knows his stuff”. I am eager to read this book and learn some new CSS techniques.
Great review. the book sounds very interesting. gonna see if i can get a sample chapter or something. thanks
A good guide to transcends CSS, also for web professionals. thanks, peter