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Book Review: The Zen of CSS Design

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I've been doing web design for many years and as the Cascading Style Sheets got more and more popular my interest in designing using CSS grew. In the beginning I was using CSS to format text and paragraphs, but soon I discovered the advantages of designing layouts in CSS.

It is much different process then using HTML tables. It was challenging at first, and many books at that time were too technical and focused very little on design. I learned and used the basics, but my understanding and usage of CSS changed a lot after reading "The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web ".

The book was written using samples of work submitted for csszengarden.com project. Csszengarden.com is basically a demonstration of what can be done to the layout and content of the website by making changes to CSS file only. Each section of the book focuses on use of CSS for different elements of the website. For example: use of font, background graphics, colors, layout etc.

Now the book doesn't give you tutorials on how to recreate each website sampled, but explains why certain elements were used and teaches you some basic design techniques. However, some things are understood best if explained in code, and this book does a great job of doing that as well.

The book is great and I recommend it to all web designers, from novice to expert.

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