The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web

I have always admired Dave Shea's CSS work and the Zen Garden site but this book truly delivers. Beyond the incredible examples of CSS work by so many talented people, Dave and Molly have assembled a resource book for a wide audience. The layout of the book in terms of chapters, examples etc is outstanding. The examples of CSS code are short and to the point with easy to understand explanations. Prior to buying the book, I thought it might focus solely on the technical side of CSS. This isn't the case as one gets to read about why some of these designs/layouts work. This is one of those books that you read for 2 hrs, come back the next day and read again and again. It's not a 2 hr read and then sits on a shelf for the next year. My copy will get well used. Lastly, after designing commercial websites for over 15 years, and 2 years of accessible, web standards design, I can honestly say this book is in my top 3 books that I own and USE. Nice job Dave and Molly, I HIGHLY recommend this book to designers, css junkies. A MUST READ!

This is much more than an ordinary book. I hate reading programming or web books, yet I loved this book.I am a web developer with a programming background, more interested in usability than looks. I had traditionally used CSS for fonts and that's all. Recently I started exploring the true power of CSS and becoming more interested in color and imagery.Then I stumbled on the CSS Zen Garden book and web site. Together, they opened my eyes to web design as an art. It taught me principles of light, color, fonts, and layout with CSS. It helped me realize that I can have awesome web sites! I have gone on to learn Photoshop and explore my own eye for good design. Armed with new knowledge, I look forward to working on my own design for the Zen Garden.

I have read the site from i begin with Webdevelopment andThe One And Only places for inpiration about CSS..Thanks for this book.

Since I'm a frequent visitor to the excellent CSS Zen Garden web site, I purchased this book hoping that it would enlighten me regarding the technical implementation of some of the more advanced CSS designs. Unfortunately, I think the book just misses the mark. What you get is a brief six page explanation of a particular design concept for each of the 36 included designs. This is all good, but I was hoping to see at least a few of the very advanced designs completely dissected in explanation, from beginning of the source to the end. Intermediate CSS coders will undoubtedly pick up a useful technique or two. Still, it's a good book that could have been great.

I bought this book understanding that it would help me learn CSS design, but soon found that it was not for the beginner but for an experienced CSS practitioner. The book is divided into themes such as 'Layout', 'Typography', etc. and illustrates the points being made by references to examples on the web site.You can browse to the relevant pages and read the CSS code to understand how effects were made. As such the book is an inspiration for beginners to aim for after they have had some experience with CSS, perhaps by going to the original inventors, Lie and Bos:  Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web (3rd Edition) .

Hi, I'm a sophomore who bought this book to help me with my MYP/IB Personal Project (which was to create a website), and it was a GREAT resource! Reading it isn't like reading boring, detailed and dull instructions but more like clear, great, well written and easily comprehensible insight. Shea and Holzschlag has also included snippets of clean CSS that really helps you understand what the ideas are.I borrowed this book from the library three times before I finally said "screw it", this book has been the most valuable and well-written CSS book I've read to me. I actually learn things and go "OHHHHHHHH" reading this book. I know I will never regret buying this book.

[...] I already knew this would be a design book and not a CSS guide.The problem is that both the book and the site are misleading. These are essentially home pages by graphic designers. However as a practical matter, none of these designs would work site-wide - rather the point of a style sheet, after all. There's simply not enough screen 'real estate' to accommodate content in subsequent pages. In addition, the designs are such that tooling them to 'brand' across sub-pages sitewide would be very difficult, and the book provides no examples, guidelines, or suggestions for doing so.For inspiration, to see what you can do with color and layout, and for finding your own unique vision, this book may be useful. For designing sites of more than one page, however, this book falls short.

As a dabbler in HTML for the last ten years, I have heard about CSS and it's many benefits, but had no hands-on experience with it. When I discovered the Zen of CSS site, I knew I had to get the book. It is a beautiful book, both physically and content-wise. There is a lot of effort put into this book and it shows. It melds the technical with the artistic in simple prose. I have learned much already, and would recommend this book to anyone who wishes to ride the wave of CSS in this exciting time of web design! Two thumbs up! - Mark Howell, Round Rock, Texas.

Awesome book. HTML and CSS are pretty easy to figure out. The challenge is design. That's what this book really helps you with.

If you thought standard-compliant CSS web pages had to be boxy and bland, this book will show you how wrong you were. The book simply shows many designs for the same web page and then talks you through the logic behind the CSS techniques used in the design. It is a great source of inspiration. What the book is not is a CSS reference book - try the O'Reilly series for one of these. What this book is, however, is a demonstration of what can be acheived with a modicum of CSS skills and a lot of artistic talent.

Bought as a Xmas gift

Not really a technical book for a person who wants to learn CSS

This book is not a CSS tutorial, rather a sales pitch and guide for 'correct' use of the technology. It uses the csszengarden.com website as a case study for explaining how to make innovative use of CSS by explaining the structure, then the thinking behind the various designs submitted to the site. So it's actually more of a guide to design - but one that I would recommend that web developers read.I say this as a (sometime) ASP/ASP.NET/PHP developer, who up until this point, "doesn't do design". I saw it as an inconvenience in the creation of otherwise technically brilliant (modesty eh!) web applications. Yet the whole css zen garden concept could actually make the life of web developers a lot easier.Developers could eschew design altogether while creating web pages/forms that offer true flexibility for real designers. But the beauty of this book is that it actually gives hints, tips, and pointers, that in the absence of a designer in teams of programmers, could help make web developers into half decent designers.This is more of an interest book that will hopefully change the attitude of the new breed of unwilling web designers that the .NET framework has created. It may also help designers that aren't currently working with new media to bring their talents to the web in a way that doesn't involve using Macromedia Flash.It's not perfect but it will open your eyes.