Author: Eric A. Meyer
Publisher: O’Reilly
Year: 2007
ISBN 10: 1-56592-622-6 | ISBN 13: 9781565926226
Let me begin by saying this book is one of the most important, if not THE most important, web design and development books in my personal library. It is a reference for CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) styles, but it is so much more. I read the book from cover to cover twice, and both times found it to be both an easy read and incredibly informative.
It opens with a chapter on how and why CSS evolved, and then Chapter Two goes into the basic rules for writing CSS code. The difference between block-level elements and inline-elements is clearly explained, as is when it is appropriate to use classes versus IDs and vice versa.
The rest of the book covers how the cascade works and defines terms such as specificity and inheritance. Chapter Five discusses the various options for using fonts, font weights, font families, styles, and variants. Chapter Seven explains the box model (a problem for many beginning web developers since different browsers sometimes apply the rules differently), while Chapter Eight goes into more detail, covering the differences between margins, padding, borders, etc.
All in all, it is a wonderful book that should be required reading for anyone who is interested in learning how to construct and style web pages properly.