CSS

Fine, fine.... now that I know this works, here is some real content.

So, both for my professional life and for Dr. Lunch, I've been looking into doing some real work with CSS. Previously I had kinda, sort of known about in the half-ass way developers who don't really want to know anything about design kind of intutively know how it works and then don't really worry themselves about it very much -- now that I'm getting into it, I can see that is really a powerful tool and slick as hell to boot.

Being a good and rightous person I went and picked up two O'Reilly books to get up to speed on CSS: Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition and CSS Cookbook.

Quick reviews after spending the weekend reading both of them (oh yes, exciting days around the Drake household this weekend. I did win $500 playing blackjack Saturday night though, if anyone cares, so its not like the weekend was a total waste). I usually really like O'Reilly books, and thought some of the Cookbook series were very good references -- I use my Java Cookbook quite a bit. CSS Cookbook though -- ugh. Save your money. If you are competent enough to do rudimentary CSS you aren't going to find anything in here that's actually useful. If you don't know CSS, I think you time is better spent reading other books. I see this one going on my bookshelf, gathering dust, and eventually turning into a beautiful butterfly or something.

Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, however, is an excellent reference and tells you everything you'd ever want to know on the subject, and has lots of useful advice for how to deal with various quirks you come across among the various flavors of browsers you might have to deal with on a public web site. I highly recommend it if you are getting into doing serious development using CSS.