CSS Pocket Reference: Visual Presentation for the Web

This book is great for quick references. I've been coding CSS for years, but I still need a quick reference here and there. This pocket reference is perfect for those scenarios. It contains enough information to get a beginner up and running quickly with a little additional research. The basic concepts are in the beginning. The book is full of selectors and properties with explanations on their use (in alphabetic order). The explanations are very helpful and the examples are clear. I highly recommend this book. Its quick and useful to have on hand... and won't break the bank.

I am completely comfortable with CSS, but there are plenty of selectors and properties that I don't use all the time, so I forget the possible values for the properties, or I forget if the property has "text" or "font" in the name, or something like that. This pocket reference appears to be complete, and it's easy to use and keep at hand and get around in because it's physically so small and doesn't include a lot of discursive explanation. It does include enough explanation to know what each CSS property does. Since I got it, I pretty much never look in my many larger CSS books.

I own the 4th edition, copyright 2011, and bought this updated one when I saw it on Amazon. This edition is 195 pages; the 4th edition is 238 pages. There is no description of the changes in the book (to save space no doubt) but it appears the smaller page count has two causes. On is that certain obscure CSS3 properties are no longer listed. For example, the 4th edition has an 'Aural Media' section that includes elements such as 'voice-family' and 'cue'. Those are gone from this edition, presumably because the W3C has deprecated those functions. The second reason is because there is less white space in general in this edition, and that's actually a good thing. I found the 4th edition harder to parse because the listing of property values was spaced out on different lines and a simple horizontal rule separated the property descriptions. In this edition the properties are more clearly delineated with a double bold border around each property, and the property descriptions are laid out in left-right columns that are easier to scan. The selectors and queries section received the same reformatting. The introductory Basic Concepts and Values chapters are still present with little change other than for being updated for 2018. Another nice thing about the 5th edition is that the header for every property contains two flags indicating whether the property is inheritable and can be animated. In general, CSS3 was relatively new in 2011 and that edition contained a lot of 'not yet supported' and ' tentative' comments in the descriptions. In 2018 CSS3 is a lot less rough around the edges, and this edition has been pruned and parsed as necessary to bring it more in line with the CSS3 state-of-the-art in 2018. That, along with it's much better formatting, makes it a worthwhile upgrade in my opinion.

I was a total noob about CSS last year and the book is cryptic if you expect to know everything about CSS by reading it cover to cover. It works great as a reference index for looking up a specific task needed and gives a few examples of how to use that item in a css file (by the way, make the css filename all lower case). So I have learned incrementally by slowly learning how to use a few items at a time. I cannot believe that I ignored css in the old days and hand-coded repetitive html in every old-school page. Now, a tweak in the css file and my entire site responds to the change (OK, you youngsters can chortle at my slow adoption of this useful feature.) One lesson learned with Chrome: CLEAR your browsing images and files whenever you change your css file. Chrome has a quirk that retains the first time it ever saw the file and never ever updates its cached copy. Microsoft Edge does not seem to have that issue, but for sanity sake I clear my browsing images and files for Edge as well.

I am a hobby CSS programmer with a background in BASIC, HTML and UNIX shell scripting. I do not have the patience to read a programming manual so reference manuals work very well for me. The CSS Pocket Reference has what I wanted in a concise format. However, it also has some errors. Page 10, paragraph 3 misspelled "however" as "howerver". The reference information in Chapter 4, page 171 for "table-layout" gives 2 incorrect examples that say "table-display". So far as I can tell there is no such CSS property as "table-display". On page 74, I was pleasantly surprised to see the author properly identify the octothorpe instead of calling it a hash symbol or number symbol or pound symbol. There is a lot of information in this book that I still do not understand and likely will never use but it has helped me improve my CSS coding.

This is a small pocket reference of CSS commands - it does not claim to be a text book or tutorial. It is exactly as advertised and well worth the money.

Great little book is very resourceful. The definition is practical and consistent and great example easy to take it anywhere.

This book is very useful. Love it.

Une référence dans tous les sens du terme : écrit par Eric Meyer, une sommité du CSS. Bien mis à jour, avec CSS grids par exemple. Un angle de plus pour toujours avoir sous la main ce qu'on cherche en plus des outils en ligne, divers PDF, etc...

I like it, because it also gives examples.

Does exactly what I wanted a quick reference for CSS, nice to flick through and refer to.

It truly is a reference making easy to find what you need knowledge about. But there should not be so much background data, because reference user already have that data.

Bought this to help me study for an exam on web design. Found it to be a great help to jog my memory, with a well structured layout. Very easy to find information. It's not a complete reference but it's good to have with you in an emergency.