CSS By The Book (July 2023)
Learn CSS with these books, written by web development experts providing projects, best practices and visuals that communicate CSS concepts better than words ever could
As I’ve described in my latest blog post, I’ve been studying CSS actively over the last two months. Although I prefer video-based learning over book-based learning, I found some great CSS books that are worth mentioning for various reasons. Each book is different and offers a unique approach to teaching CSS concepts. Which one works best for you depends on what you’re looking for, so I’ve tried to describe what it teaches you and how. I have no preference for one book or another, so this is not a rating or top X.
“HTML and CSS: Design and Build Websites” by Jon Ducket is worth owning for its graphic design alone. It looks fantastic (with great colors too). The layout focuses on visuals and translates CSS concepts to paper, and it works great. There is not much text to read, so this is not a textbook approach as with standard textbooks. It shows you side-by-side comparisons of different layout options, which is great so you can compare and see the direct results of CSS code. This is similar to a video course.
I have not read this book from cover to cover, but I noticed great use cases, best practices and advice for applying CSS. A great resource that is available online with Packt Publishing’s online subscription (you can read the book online with a subscription, but it’s not possible to download it in exchange for credits).
“Web Design Playground. HTML + CSS The Interactive Way” was a PDF giveaway during the pandemic from Manning’s website. I think a new edition is about to come out this year. The first edition teaches you CSS concepts through a project-based approach and takes it bit by bit. the PDF of the book is in color, which makes for an attractive layout and helps to focus your attention on key points. There are a lot of asides (in color) with extra bits of information, but I found these to be distracting from the main text. It looks like each page has been designed as a web page, complete with main section and side bars! On the other hand, the book contains a lot of information compressed into its 436 pages. For a complete beginner, this book holds great value.
“Tiny CSS Projects” has been published recently by Manning. The authors are two experienced web developers and the book contains 12 chapters with a total of 392 pages. From the Introduction: “Tiny CSS Projects is for readers who know the basics of HTML and frontend development. No experience in CSS is required. Both beginners and experienced coders will develop a deeper understanding of CSS through this book. Rather than present a theoretical view of CSS, each chapter applies a different part of CSS to a project to demonstrate in practice how CSS works.”
You will probably understand from this quote that this is not a book for beginners as it does not teach you the basics of CSS. Instead, it offers you some nice-looking projects that you can use to level up basic CSS skills. Of course, you get the example code that shows you how the final project looks as well as the code before starting the project. That way, you can decide to code along with the authors and build the project. These snippets are rather long and contain comments to better understand what certain lines do. This means you need to know basic HTML and CSS concepts to understand what is going on. If you’ve finished the 11-hour CSS for Beginners course on FreeCodeCamp’s YouTube channel, this won’t be a problem. A great project-based book for web developers looking for inspiration and larger projects.
This is another recent book from Manning. It’s not a CSS book but teaches design principles to designers. From the Introduction: “This book focuses on teaching developers about visual design and user experience fundamentals within the context of the web and how to apply those fundamentals to their current or future role.”
You could see this is a course on how to communicate through design and how design principles help you choose a design that “works”. So this is not about how to style a page, but choose a layout and think about what you want to include in that layout.
After a set of web design tutorials, I found this as a very welcome read that taught me to think about why certain websites work better than others. I’ve seen so many WordPress template-based websites for startups where I am sure nothing has been designed by humans. Add to that templates with landing pages where you have to scroll endlessly to reach the footer. All examples of bad design. This book tells you how to avoid these pitfalls. The PDF is in color.
This is another Manning title and focuses on advanced CSS concepts and use cases. A great resource for experienced web developers who want to review fundamentals, use CSS at scale, or learn more about animations, transitions and transforms.
There are two additional chapters, presented as “appendixes”, that make this book great reference material if you decide to purchase the paper edition: one about CSS selectors and one about CSS preprocessors. This material could also have been included earlier in the book as standalone chapters but works better as separate parts at the end of the book. The PDF of the book is in color, which improves readability over a black-and-white paper copy.
The added value is the highly personalized content, as a result of years of experience working with CSS. The author explains why he makes certain design choices and explains custom solutions for design problems he encountered and a difficult to solve using “standard” CSS code. Such solutions will only make sense to you if you have worked extensively with CSS, so for beginners, there is not much to learn here. That said, it offers chapters on many advanced CSS topics not found in beginner books.
This was the first CSS book I ever bought, as it covers a wide range of topics and is written by an experienced web developer. I read many great reviews on Amazon that convinced me to purchase and read it. Although I haven’t read all chapters, I think there’s a lot of value for developers eager to improve their web development skills.