Review: “CSS3: The Missing Manual” By David Sawyer McFarland, O’Reilly Media

Repetition is the mother of study

CSS3: The Missing Manual is the first book I read from Missing Manuals series. Book is divided into 5 parts. First part covers basics — author writes about HTML/HTML5, Doctype, CSS selectors & style inheritance. Cascade appears in 5 Chapter. Explanation of specifity was a bit confusing when I read about it. It’s good that author pointed out that “the math involved in calculating specificity is actually a bit more complicated than described here”. Parts 2-4 are the core of the book. Every chapter covers solid piece of CSS/CSS3 knowledge.

What I like the most in this book that almost every chapter contains tutorial at the end. It gave me hands-on experience — I started from scratch and after some steps I got beautifully styled page. CSS3: The Missing Manual contains a lot of references: to other parts of the book and external resources. It’s much easier that way to study less known topics. Author included many tips, best practices; mentioned about interesting articles, helpful on-line tools — I really appreciate every little thing that make my developer life a bit easier

After reading I can write that CSS3: The Missing Manual filled some gaps in my CSS/CSS3 knowledge. I took a deeper look on CSS transforms, transitions & animations. I learned a lot about layouts (fixed width, liquid). It was good to get to know more about responsive web design, how to prepare page for desktop & mobile browser. Part Three & Four helped me better understand different techniques and solutions used on modern web pages.

If you interested in CSS3, that’s book for you.

My rating: