CSS Pocket Reference Author: Eric A. Meyer Pages: 91 Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates ISBN: 0-596-00120-7 Summary: A helpful, concice guide to CSS1 Review Date: 29 December, 2003

As more and more web designers move from static to dynamically generated, and templated websites, Cascading Style Sheets have become commonplace as a mechanism to make overall site consistency easier, and to give better control over the presentation of web content. O'Reilly's CSS Pocket Reference provides a handy reference to each of the CSS1 properties, pseudo-elements, and pseudo-classes.

The first few pages of the book are dedicated to a brief overview of Cascading Style Sheets, how to add style sheets to your HTML, and the bare rudiments for working with rules and selectors. If you're a web newby, you'll probably want to start with an introduction to HTML first, and then probably get a copy of Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, also by Eric Meyer. If you're familiar with web development, this section should serve as a decent introduction to get you on the right path to working with CSS.

The next section is a CSS Property reference, which covers alphabetically, each of the properties available in CSS1. Coverage of each property includes whether or not the property is inherited, where it is applicable, a brief description of the property, and how it is used, and also a small compatibility chart describing the level of support in several browsers for the given property on Windows and Mac. (As of 12/2003, the compatibility charts are starting to show their age, however, covering only IE 4,5, and 5.5, Netscape 4 and 6, and Opera 3 and 4). Brief examples are also given for each property.

The final section of the book is a collection of more in-depth CSS1 browser support charts, covering levels of support in the above-indicated browsers for "basic [CSS] concepts, pseudo-classes and pseudo-elements, the cascade, font properties, color and background properties, text properties, box properties, classification properties, [and] units."[1] While comprehensive, the chart suffers from the same aging symptoms mentioned above. I would imagine, though, that O'Reilly likely has a second edition in the works.

To conclude, when I approached this book, I was already somewhat familiar with CSS, but the overview at the front of the book was still helpful, and I have found the property reference to be useful to help me remember what values are available for each property. So far I haven't had to worry too much about browser compatibility issues, but I imagine the compatibility charts would be immensely valuable for anyone who does have to worry about such things, at least with respect to the range of browsers covered. Again, I would definitely recommend the author's meatier Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide if you plan to do any extensive development with CSS1. The pocket reference covered here makes for a good companion work, though. As for CSS2 coverage, there's none in the pocket reference, and only one chapter in the Guide. I imagine it will be treated more extensively in future editions, however.

Overall Rating: 7/10

[1] CSS Pocket Reference, page 53.