In case you are wondering what a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) is I will take a moment to explain. A style sheet is a document that attaches itself to your webpage and helps to control the layout, size, colour etc of everything that is on your page. As a web developer this means that if the client decides they want blue text instead of black then you only have to change one line of code in your stylesheet and the change will cascade through all your pages. This makes development and redevelopment time much quicker than it was 10 years ago.

“CSS, The Missing Manual” is one of those books that does not sit on the bookshelf, it sits on my desk. It is a constant point of reference for whenever I am having problems getting a stylesheet to work the way I want it to. This book was responsible for enabling me to drop tables from my designs as it explained clearly how to use div tags efficiently in my designs.

It has an excellent, in depth, reference guide to all the most commonly used elements and their attributes. In addition it can act as a good beginners guide to Cascading Style Sheets, starting with the real basics like how to attach a stylesheet to your webpage. With each successive chapter the book builds on your knowledge giving you tips and tutorials on subjects such as using CSS in your menus (remember when you used to spend hours creating buttons in Photoshop?) through to using CSS for printed pages and cross browser compatibility.

Possibly the only downside of this book is that it does not cover CSS 3.0, however the book was first published in 2006 so we can forgive David Sawyer McFarland for this.

Over the last 3 years that I have had this book I have found it to be invaluable. As said previously, there is an excellent reference section, but better than that is the way that you can just dive into a section to learn and understand the relevant techniques that I have needed to complete numerous projects. By truly understanding Cascading Style Sheets I have become a far better programmer, reducing my page size, using inheritance to keep my CSS file sizes down and no longer having to rely on graphics that take time to create and .

This means that I can create sites more quickly allowing me to pass on the reduced costs of creating a site for my clients. For my clients they get a project finished sooner and for a lower price. Finally by using CSS webpages load faster and one of the things that Google penalises is slow loading sites.

This is a book I would thoroughly recommend to anybody who is in the business of designing or building webpages.