Review: The CSS Anthology

The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks
Author: Rachel Andrew
Paperback: 400 pages
Cost: $26.37
Published: August, 2007

I’ve never claimed to be a programmer but working in SEO means that I’m involved in creating or editing hundreds of pages over the course of a year. Understanding how CSS works, and being able to implement basic to more advanced CSS strategies, has become essential over the past few years. Until now I’ve only had a rudimentary knowledge of CSS. The CSS Anthology has helped me grow my knowledge significantly on the topic.

I’ll admit that I didn’t follow the coding examples line by line, but that’s the beauty of this book. You don’t have to be a CSS programmer to be able to follow it. The great benefit of this book to the non-programmer like me, is simply knowing what kind of styling tricks can be accomplished via CSS. It’s easy to search for CSS tricks once you know what can be done, but until you do, then searching can be a shot in the dark. That’s what makes CSS Anthology such a good reference.

At 400 pages, it’s actually a very quick read unless you study all the CSS code examples provided. If you’re like me, you burn right past them which leaves you with probably about 150 pages of actual reading. But it’s all very valuable material. I can say that I have a much firmer grasp on what can be done with CSS and as I look to implement some of these tricks on the sites I work on I’ll frequently be referring back to the book.