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Thanks for all the responses so far! Any recommendations about CSS? And recommendations for good books apart from "Javascript the good parts" mentioned so far?

malandrew 16y ago
Eric Meyer is the go to guy for CSS. Also check out "Handcrafted CSS" by Dan Cederholm. The only part of that book that is no longer a best practice is his .after float hack, which today has been replaced by the overflow:auto hack.
grayrest 16y ago
CSS is actually the tweakiest part of the frontend triumvirate. The syntax isn't hard (selector + bag of key/value pairs) but putting it together so it reliably renders on all browsers takes weeks/months. I'd recommend doing sass/compass instead which both provides an abstraction layer and a library of working code. If you're starting from nothing, the SASS syntax will probably be easier to work with than the default SCSS syntax. You can dig into the libraries if you really care about how things work, but it's always easier to start from something that works than to try to figure out stuff from scratch.
- malandrew 16y ago
  I second this suggestion to work with Compass/SASS. I use SASS and HAML together. Avoid the desire to work with one of popular grid frameworks like Blueprint or 960.gs unless you are sure that your project really needs something like that.
adamesque 16y ago
If you're going to read Designing w/Web Standards, you'll get a very very good head start with CSS. You may be able to get by for a while just using what that book teaches. But, I actually really recommend at least skimming through parts the CSS2 spec. There are more human-readable passages than you might expect. Specifically: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/cascade.html http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/cascade.html Most beginner CSS devs don't really understand how inheritance and the cascade work (it isn't necessarily last-rule-wins, it's based on selector specificity). This part of the spec spells it all out. http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/box.html http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/box.html http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/visuren.html http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/visuren.html These are easily the two most important pages of the spec. If you understand these, you'll be able to take away 90% of the mystery and guesswork that can go into laying out a page. Nearly every time I've seen a developer struggling with CSS issues, it's turned out that they've had an imperfect understanding of the basic concepts that are spelled out here. And for a technical spec, these pages are amazingly readable and understandable.
rimantas 16y ago
You cannot go wrong with these which will teach you how to do things "the right way“, not some outdated stuff: CSS Mastery: http://www.cssmastery.com/ http://www.cssmastery.com/ Bulletproof Web Design http://astore.amazon.com/simplebits-20/detail/0321509021 http://astore.amazon.com/simplebits-20/detail/0321509021 Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook http://astore.amazon.com/simplebits-20/detail/1430219203 http://astore.amazon.com/simplebits-20/detail/1430219203 Handcrafted CSS http://handcraftedcss.com/ http://handcraftedcss.com/ It would be worth to check out some about HTML5: Brief but good introduction: http://books.alistapart.com/products/html5-for-web-designers http://books.alistapart.com/products/html5-for-web-designers Also: http://introducinghtml5.com/ http://introducinghtml5.com/ and http://diveintohtml5.org/ http://diveintohtml5.org/

malandrew 16y ago

Eric Meyer is the go to guy for CSS. Also check out "Handcrafted CSS" by Dan Cederholm. The only part of that book that is no longer a best practice is his .after float hack, which today has been replaced by the overflow:auto hack.

grayrest 16y ago

CSS is actually the tweakiest part of the frontend triumvirate. The syntax isn't hard (selector + bag of key/value pairs) but putting it together so it reliably renders on all browsers takes weeks/months. I'd recommend doing sass/compass instead which both provides an abstraction layer and a library of working code. If you're starting from nothing, the SASS syntax will probably be easier to work with than the default SCSS syntax. You can dig into the libraries if you really care about how things work, but it's always easier to start from something that works than to try to figure out stuff from scratch.

malandrew 16y ago
I second this suggestion to work with Compass/SASS. I use SASS and HAML together. Avoid the desire to work with one of popular grid frameworks like Blueprint or 960.gs unless you are sure that your project really needs something like that.

adamesque 16y ago

If you're going to read Designing w/Web Standards, you'll get a very very good head start with CSS. You may be able to get by for a while just using what that book teaches. But, I actually really recommend at least skimming through parts the CSS2 spec. There are more human-readable passages than you might expect. Specifically: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/cascade.html http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/cascade.html Most beginner CSS devs don't really understand how inheritance and the cascade work (it isn't necessarily last-rule-wins, it's based on selector specificity). This part of the spec spells it all out. http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/box.html http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/box.html http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/visuren.html http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/visuren.html These are easily the two most important pages of the spec. If you understand these, you'll be able to take away 90% of the mystery and guesswork that can go into laying out a page. Nearly every time I've seen a developer struggling with CSS issues, it's turned out that they've had an imperfect understanding of the basic concepts that are spelled out here. And for a technical spec, these pages are amazingly readable and understandable.

rimantas 16y ago

You cannot go wrong with these which will teach you how to do things "the right way“, not some outdated stuff: CSS Mastery: http://www.cssmastery.com/ http://www.cssmastery.com/ Bulletproof Web Design http://astore.amazon.com/simplebits-20/detail/0321509021 http://astore.amazon.com/simplebits-20/detail/0321509021 Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook http://astore.amazon.com/simplebits-20/detail/1430219203 http://astore.amazon.com/simplebits-20/detail/1430219203 Handcrafted CSS http://handcraftedcss.com/ http://handcraftedcss.com/ It would be worth to check out some about HTML5: Brief but good introduction: http://books.alistapart.com/products/html5-for-web-designers http://books.alistapart.com/products/html5-for-web-designers Also: http://introducinghtml5.com/ http://introducinghtml5.com/ and http://diveintohtml5.org/ http://diveintohtml5.org/