Anyone who has ever seen Andy present will probably have already bought this book, so this review is for everyone else. The book is inspirational. Just like the stage show. Last year we were treated to some great CSS books for beginners and it was cool to finish the year off with a book for the rest of us. Not to say this book isn't for beginners but it's emphasis is more on getting out of the inevitable comfort zones we settle into as CSS developers rather than covering the basics of syntax and how to make an unordered list go across the page.

Divided into four sections, Andy first talks up his transcendent CSS philosophy with its "content-out" approach, use of a greater range of CSS selectors including CSS3, using JavaScript and the DOM to plug the gaps in CSS and generally not working to the lowest common denominator but adding progressive enhancement for those users of modern browsers. In the section on Process the reader is offered some thoughts on workflow, wireframing and interactive prototyping before putting the principles into practice. True to the book's word, all the examples are best viewed in a modern browser — this is not an exercise in bulletproof design — that's left for us to do naturally, particularly undoing or not implementing Andy's choice of using JavaScript to clear a float.

The third section was the meat of this food-inspired book on CSS. Note: do not read this when hungry or on a diet, the full-bleed, gorgeous photos of food can overwhelm the weak of will. Dealing with Inspiration Andy looks outside the Web at newspapers and magazines as well as at websites for examples of grid-based designs and how to bring these ideas together in new ways. The reader is introduced to mood boards and scrapbooks and asked to (re)examine Flash as well as seek out typographic inspiration. With Windows Vista now out, I noted that Andy's examples were using the new Vista fonts as a first choice — and why not? By coincidence I read this chapter on the train journey to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and it certainly made me view the art collection in a completely different light. Hey! I'm supposed to be a developer, not a designer… I guess the chapter and the book must be working then.

The book concludes with Transcendence — a look at the various positioning methods and CSS3. Personally, I can't wait for widespread support for the Backgrounds and Borders Module and watching the presentation of the book at the upcoming Future of Web Design conference.

A bookshelf essential.

There's a plethora of books and Internet resources on the subject of designing websites with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) but whether you are just starting out as a complete novice or have solid, intermediary experience this book offers a very useful grounding in theory and application.

The foundation chapter provides a clear and easy to understand introduction to meaningful markup techniques for CSS "hooks" - divs, spans, ids and classes as well as discussion on DOCTYPEs, browser modes and validation before diving in to CSS selector types, the cascade and specificity. The chapter finishes with discussion on how best to organise your stylesheets - no, don't just lump it all together in a single file ;)

The second chapter is a very useful recap of the visual formatting model (i.e. the box model and absolute / relative / float positioning) and will serve as a great reminder for when your complex layouts start to misbehave - something that all CSS practioners will experience at some point.

The bulk of the book covers styling specific elements of your design and includes layout, image replacement, styling links, lists, forms and tables. People tend not to get too adventurous with styling tables and forms so that chapter is welcome and the advanced treatment of visited and external-website links is also of interest.

The major selling point for me was the two chapters on CSS hacks (filters) and bugs (and bug fixing). There are a number of websites that cover these issues but I lack that particular resource on my bookshelf and call me old-fashioned, but I do like my books to pull stuff together in this manner. Inside these chapters you'll learn about the (in)famous star hack, the !important hack and bugs such as the three-pixel text jog and the "HasLayout" effect to name but a few. Armed with these two chapters I may well spot a problem in the stylesheet before seeing it in a browser and save a few hours of debugging later on - incidentally, the section on debugging will certainly reduce any feeling of headless chicken in that regard.

The book bows out with the obligatory case studies that pull together a couple of websites using the techniques previously explained.

Highly recommended.

This book starts with the basics and explains just what a blog is, the associated terminology and other technologies that you can use to create a blog to be proud of. The second chapter talks about setting up a local test environment with PHP, mySQL and Apache for Windows and Mac users and finishes with setting up your blog database with phpMyAdmin. Now, if this level of technology use gives you the heeby-jeebies - then fear not. It is so well written, with plenty of screenshots you will finish chapter 2 with a big grin and a muttered "that wasn't bad at all". The few pages with screenshots on backing up your database was very welcomed by me - far too often in an online tutorial we hear "back up your database" with no explanation of how or provided with a link to another tutorial. Thank You.

Now, with the foundation in place, the bulk of the book looks at each of the major (self-hosted) blogging systems. If you are buying this book because you don't have your own blog or want something more configurable than a hosted solution like blogger.com, then do take the time to read each of the following chapters to see which one captures your imagination (or wallet if ExpressionEngine catches the eye). With that freshly created local test environment you can download and install each type to see which system works best for you.

If you already have a blog using one of these systems the value of this book may be lessened for you because you may feel that the three other chapters are not applicable. That was my initial impression. But no, read those other chapters! Firstly, the well-written chapters may well sway you to switch technologies and secondly, without getting bogged down in the code samples too much, there are some nice little gems of information regarding CSS, design and image usage buried not too deeply.

The book rounds off with a chapter on creating your own publishing system - a scary thought to be sure but with flow diagrams, screenshots, a logical approach and well-written text you'll be out the other side of the project by the end of the day. The only prerequisite I would say is that you do need to be comfortable with markup and CSS already - this isn't a book to teach you those skills, it's introducing you to PHP and mySQL in a very hands-on, example driven style.

Not an "essential" (5 star) book for your bookshelf, but if you are about to take the plunge into the world of blogging or want to get more out your system this is an excellent book.

Recommended.

As a former soldier myself, I bought this book as a holiday read at the airport and was not disappointed - in fact it was very hard to put down.

He starts his story in Sierra Leone, then on to Northern Ireland, out to the desert of Iraq and finally back home under the cloud of war crime charges. Throughout it all there is much soldierly humour (some of the photo captions are priceless), potted histories of the people and places caught in turmoil and naturally the role he played in it all.

Colonel Collins comes across very much as a soldier's officer - leads by example, cultivates initiative and keeps BS to a minimum. No doubt his speech will go down in history. A pity his approach to the liberation of the Iraqi people, cultivated no doubt by his time with the SAS and on the streets of his hometown of Belfast, could not have been more widely adopted and maintained.

I highly recommend this book.

I'd like to post this review but I haven't written enough to satisfy Brigadier Champion's strict criteria. Display the minimum word-count and Ajaxify an as-you-type word count perhaps?

Edit: ha! that worked :p

...goes to Andy Clarke for getting Logan's Run and Battlestar Galactica into a book on Cascading Style Sheets.

The book is divided into two parts with Colly first introducing the reader to the basics of CSS before moving on to an in-depth look at layouts, usability and accessibility enhancements, tips and troubleshooting and the obligatory (great looking) case study. Chapter 1 -- Getting Started soon enters a reasonably meaty discussion on maintaining and organising style sheets that intermediate and even advanced practitioners might also find of interest. We all have our little ways of organising our files and Colly introduces the beginner to multiple directories under that one css folder we normally only ever have (come on admit it!), modular CSS, CSS syntax, commenting and indenting as well as reusing style sheets for other devices. From a teaching perspective it was good to see some best practices being introduced right from the start -- page 9 to be precise. The next chapter looks at IDs and classes, how to use the cascade (or not), grouping, inheritence, contextual selectors and CSS measurements (pixels, percent and ems). Again, a good foundation chapter for beginners here -- too often we see font-family defined for every heading or a class put on every list item when an id on the ul was all that was required. The reader is also informed about grouping similar styles into one rule to achieve nice, compact code. I'm not sure if CSS measurements belonged in chapter 2 but by the end of it a novice would be well-informed on how to organise their style sheets and get the most out of them in as few lines as possible.

After attending Dave Shea's "Typography for the Web" presentation at @media2006 I enjoyed the recap (as it was for me) concerning text offered in chapter 4. Chapters 5 and 6 cover images and lists respectively, chapter 7 covers links -- always, always style a:active and a:focus for keyboard accessibility please - and chapter 8 introduces "HTML Element of the Year 2006": The Definition List. How many times have I used this on projects this year? I've found it to be quite versatile but keep a semantic eye on it also.

The very last chapter of part 1 deals with forms. Lovely, lovely forms. When you've had to apply accessibility retrospectively to about 10 large forms you'll understand my pain. Colly dedicates 30-odd pages to teaching novices how to mark them up and style them. I would have preferred to see things like selected="selected" mentioned for select elements and was disappointed by the accesskeys entry under "Accessibility Aids". Unless user-assigned, accesskeys are a no-no.

Part two is where you really start to roll up your sleeves and have fun. Colly offers some great discussion on floats, clearing and different types of layout before building some basic two and three-column layouts (if you're pushed for time, you can download the code snippets by the way). Chapter 12 covers contextual selectors e.g. using an ID on the body tag to really gain control of your styles on a per-page basis and reveals the secret behind equal height columns (i.e. faux columns). Some further tips and tricks are offered in chapter 15 and then it's on to the finale of the case study.

It's been a great year for people wanting to learn CSS with some really strong titles out there. Add this book to your essential list.