Posted by jayvgee on July 8, 2010 at 6:35pm
What have some people found to be the best resource for learning and mastering CSS. I have some ideas of where to go for resources, but it is always good to ask the community where they have best learned their skills from. I am looking for books, on-line tutorials, videos, etc. I plan on editing and creating custom themes and sub-themes. Any resources and advice anyone would like to post up would be great.
Thanks!
Comments
Lynda.com has CSS, PHP, and Drupal training videos
I am the author of the Drupal Themes video training series on Lynda.com, which also offers trainings for CSS, PHP, jQuery, everything you need to learn web standards used by Drupal. http://tinyurl.com/theme-drupal I highly recommend checking out the videos there.
In terms of reading material, there are tons of books but topics like CSS and PHP are covered in parts online with sites like W3Schools and DevShed.
Chris Charlton, Author & Drupal Community Leader, Enterprise Level Consultant
I teach you how to build Drupal Themes http://tinyurl.com/theme-drupal and provide add-on software at http://xtnd.us
But learning how to think in CSS is different
I use W3Schools a lot for learning the syntax of CSS (and an html refresher). But that is not the same thing as learning how to take a visual concept and figure out the structural elements for rendering that in html+css. Does anyone have a favorite resource for learning how to do that? I am looking for something that will help me see how to break out the content of a page visually the way that I know how to take it apart to put it into a data model.
I'm sure any book on CSS
I'm sure any book on CSS would help. I used "CSS the missing manual" to get started. Once you know the basics of CSS the best thing to do is put it to practice. Download Firefox (if you haven't already) and the firebug extension. Set up a Drupal test environment and start hacking away at the CSS (you can do this by creating a custom theme from scratch or copying and pasting Garland into your sites/all/themes directory).
To learn how to theme drupal (views, blocks, user login box, titles, etc.) I suggest you look for online tutorials. Lynda is a great source for video tutorials. I have not watched their Drupal Theme videos but they have saved me a lot of time in other areas. DO NOT buy PACKT Publishing's "Drupal 6 Themes." There are too many programming errors in that book and you will find yourself losing a lot of time!
Hope this helps.
A Digital Entrepreneur and Technical Consultant.
Founder, CEO of FoggyTrail
bullet proof web design
I've read a variety of CSS books. most were reference like and often difficult to follow the implications of css use. the book that helped me most in terms of coming up to speed, and really understanding best practices, I feel Dan Cederholm's "bullet proof web design" was the one that really got me over the hump. it was succinct, yet clearly covered all the main issues of design/css dev in a chapters that were case study driven. he later wrote handcrafted CSS, which is a good followup, but only after mastering the concepts in the first.
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mike stewart { twitter: @MediaDoneRight | IRC nick: mike stewart }
Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web
I found Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web by Hakon Wium Lie to be an excellent introduction and long term reference for CSS. Hakon Lie is one of the 'inventors' of CSS. He wrote the specs. This book does a lot to explain not only how but why some CSS approaches are better than others. I have the third edition which only covers CSS2 but whenever I have a CSS question, I can quickly find the answer in that book. At less than 400 pages, it's not a huge book but it packs a lot of good explanations and examples into that space.
Lynda.com
Lynda.com offers CSS video tutorials. They do more than monotonous syntax. If I remember correctly, they even design a whole site with you.
I recommend Pro CSS and HTML
I recommend Pro CSS and HTML Design Patterns. My only problem with this book is the lack of use as a reference. It will help in the learning to think in CSS department.
Use the source Luke
I prefer to get it straight from the horses mouth:
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/
When I edit a css file, the help key goes to definition as defined in http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/ or it's version 3 equivalent when appropriate.
the fun thing is that mastering comes from doing. A lot :)