Stylin' with CSS
Explains how to style text, create style sheets, position content, create links, design navigation, and style forms, lists, and tables, to enable any level designer to start quickly creating sites with CSS.
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What Hacker News says
- CSS can easily be really complicated, you can shovel layer upon layer on it and it still seems to work (a lot of guys just cut and paste in new styles). Most cutting edge CSS I see on sites is just to provide animated transitions and effects - you can reduce a lot of overhead if you don't care about animated headings and the like.
My suggestion is:
- Try to keep it simple - start with the basics - A older but very good book on CSS basics is: Stylin' With CSS: A Designer's Guide by Charles Wyke-Smith
- Use the inspect/debugging tools in your web browser to reveal the smoke and mirrors of website elements you like to figure out whats doing the actual work.
As an example is https://doplaces.com - not perfect but I tried to keep it to a minimum while still being functional and flexible...
- CSS is kinda crazy compared to programming languages - I mean that where things make sense in programming CSS makes your brain ache when you work with it. The best way to get over that is to work with it to get a feel for the syntax, Once you get a handle on that it gets way easier.
Two books that helped me the most were:
Stylin' with CSS: A Designer's Guide by Charles Wyke-Smith
This is kinda dated but does good on getting the basic structure down with a little bit on how CSS makes pages look better.
Handcrafted CSS by Dan Cederholm with Ethan Marcotte
This goes more into improving styles and how to get things working better and simpler CSS.
Both are showing their age but the approaches work for the programmer brain (more-so than books written for those who don't know programming logic at all.) Once you get these basics down, you will be able to understand what's going on when you look over googled results of what things you want to do. (and see how badly overloaded a lot of commercial sites are)
Still gonna take you months, but hopefully it won't be as frustrating as when I started trying to figure it out.
- As another primarily back-end developer, of all the programming and scripting stuff CSS is truly the most brain damaged.
Most of what I've seen is making CSS way more complex than it needs to be - part of it is thanks to years of general browser incompatibilities causing people to put in "dont go there" warnings or for the sake of compatibility of X stuff. Second would be various tools and frameworks that may have been partially implemented in some other peoples' teaching of CSS.
I would say these two books cleared away a lot of the muck for me:
Stylin' with CSS by Charles Wyke-Smith - very concise.
I also found bits in Handcrafed CCS by Dan Cederholm to be good as it worked on either bad styling or no styling and how to clean up stuff or achieve a good effect CSS wise.
After that a lot of Googling, examining pages that worked, and reading how to do x, y or z as well as just trying stuff out myself till I get it right.
- Don't do much news sites, most are pushing the shiny new tech of the month - which changes just about as often.
Advice - don't try to learn it all at once, lots of technologies (CSS is truly brain damaging to logical back-end folk, take it easy)... also best to keep your HTML as simple as possible and style and script out from there.
for a book, I suggest Stylin' with CSS: A Designer's Guide by Charles Wyke-Smith Very good terse visual intro to CSS, will give you a good insight on what CSS is capable of, which is quite a lot.
Look for the basics on responsive layouts, those grids and templates are usually set up for non-developers and add a lot of cruft you can do without. - this looks good - https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/design-and-ui...
Javascript - if you don't want a lot of effects, you can do most effects with only a little javascript without resorting to JQuery (google to help you there) same with DOM work and AJAX - Google what you need and if you get some stackoverflow suggestions read though all the examples, sometimes the less popular ones are more sane.
Especially if you are looking to do public facing front-end work, read up whatever security tips for your backend (filtering/escaping input, preventing cross-site scripting, and database exploits, etc.).
Keep plugging along, you'll get there - Good luck
- From scratch... start with the basics, HTML (definitely first), Scripting Language (PHP/Python/whatever), bits of javascript. Don't jump into CSS too early, it just messes with your brain (its very anti-logic compared to HTML and scripting languages). Once you are confident in the scripting add in a database if that's your thing. Once you are adept at getting data in and out from the server then look into prettifying things up with CSS.
A good beginning reference for CSS is "Stylin' with CSS: A Designer's Guide" by Charles Wyke-Smith, good basics. Problem with CSS is there is a lot of crap overload out there mainly because of browser variation - strive to find the simpler solutions.
- As a fellow programmer, I find CSS non intuitive.
The best book I've found as a programmer is Stylin' with CSS: A Designer's Guide by Charles Wyke-Smith. Not as much BS, cuts to the chase.
Second: start with simple styleshheet and build from there. Don't buy into the ultra fancy complex stuff till you feel ready; there a lot of good result you can get from just the basics.
