If you've tried your hand at web editing the chances are good that the technology CSS has been mentioned. It is a technology used to format web pages and can be a little daunting to begin with.

This is one of the best books on Cascading Style Sheets CSS we have read for some time. It explains the theory clearly and is well formatted. It can often be hard to make sense of large code listings and so Rachel Andrew does a good job of keeping this brief and always to the point.

CSS was created because the basic language of web pages, HTML, was never really designed to handle fancy formatting. CSS can also be used to position parts of a document on a page. This can range for columns on web pages to quote boxes.

The book is full colour throughout, and while we don't want to sound swayed by pretty pictures, this makes it much easier to read. Code excerpts are in coloured boxes and of course CSS itself adds colour to web pages so it makes sense to show this properly.

CSS is a funny technology in that the basic idea is very simple. Define the formatting of different kinds of text (headings, links and body text for example) separately from the text itself. Changing the font of body text is simple but some of the more impressive layout effects are more complicated.

The CSS Anthology takes an effective approach of only dealing with one part of CSS at a time, keeping the learning curve, and the code excerpts to a manageable length.

By the end of the book, some fairly advanced tricks are being described but the progression is sufficiently that

This is an excellent book if you want to get started with CSS, or have started and am starting to feel a little lost. The language is clear and concise and the layout prevents the reader from getting lost in what can be a complicated topic.