“这本书是我能够向 CSS 初学者推荐的最好的一本书。我可以负责任地说，买这本书的 20 美元是我在学习 Web 设计过程中花得最值的。”

英文评论链接

1. By Spencer Hall (Baltimore, MD)

Cheesy Title, but an Awesome CSS Book!

When I started browsing Amazon for a CSS book appropriate for a beginner, I was overwhelmed by just how many there are out there! I read all the reviews and such, but could not really determine any major difference between the books or figure out which ones were `better than the others.I decided that in order to make my decision I was going to have to flip through the books a little myself before purchasing. I took my little list to the local bookstore, gathered all of them up, and plopped down on a couch. I flipped through about 6 different books including Designing with Web Standards, CSS Core, CSS Cookbook, Beginning CSS, both Eric Meyer books, and of course, Stylin’ with CSS.
I really didn’t expect much from this book, I kind of grabbed it as an afterthought, or “might as well…”.I spent a good hour or so browsing the table of contents, reading bits and pieces of each book to get a feel for the author’s style. I have to say I was not impressed with most of these, particularly the Eric Meyer books that so many people seem to swear by. My decision came down to Stylin’ With CSS or Designing with Web Standards by Dan Cedarholm.
I chose Stylin’ with CSS for several reasons. For one, Charles Wyke-Smith has a great, easy style of writing and explaining the concepts behind the rules of CSS. CSS is not overly difficult, but there is a learning curve and Wyke-Smith breaks it down into plain English. Secondly, the organization of the book is probably the most logical among the CSS books. It is not a reference book, as there are thorough explanations, but it is organized like a reference- by topic, in a sensible order. This makes it not only easy to follow the first time around, but makes it much easier to jump back to as a reference when needed. The quick reference chart in the back also comes in handy, and this book stays next to my computer at all times. Lastly, the page layout of the book is also visually appealing. It’s not a picture book, but it doesn’t look like a dictionary either. There’s just the right amount of helpful images and screenshots, as well as colored text to differentiate code from explanations.
This book is the best that I can recommend for getting started in CSS. I can honestly say that my purchase was the best $20 I’ve ever spent on web design.

书名一般，但内容却令人肃然起敬！（142人中的138人认为本评论有用）

当我想在 Amazon 中找一本适合初学者的 CSS 书时，没想到居然有那么多相关的主题，简直令人目不暇接。于是，我读完了所有相关的评论，但却无法分辨出这些书之间有哪些主要的不同，或者说仍然无法知道哪些书会更好。

为了作出自己的选择，我决定在正式购买之前先到书店翻翻这些书的内容。我拿着自己的图书清单来到了附近的书店，找到了所有书，并抱着这些书坐在书店里的大椅子上准备大干一场。我翻阅了大约 6 本不同的书，包括 Designning with Web Standards、CSS Core、CSS Cookbook、Beginning CSS、两本 Eric Meyer 的书，当然，还有 Stylin’ with CSS。

其实我对这些书的期望并不高，只是想买了以后不会后悔，或者说“最好（能碰上一本不错的书。译者注）……”。我花了足足一个钟头浏览这些书的目录，并读了每本书中的一些章节，想要感受一下作者的风格。但令人失望的是，对其中大多数我都没有什么印象，特别是那么多人都推崇的 Eric Meyer 的那两本。最后，我决定在 Styin’ With CSS 和 Dan Cedarholm 的 Designing with Web Standards 中选择一本。

最后，我选择了 Styin’ With CSS，原因如下：一、Charles Wyke-Smith 以非常简单的写作风格解释了 CSS 规则的含义。CSS 并不太难掌握，但需要一个合理的学习曲线，而 Wyke-Smith 把这个学习过程通过语言表达了出来。二、这本书的组织可能是所有 CSS 书中最符合逻辑的。它虽然不是一本参考书（并没有包罗万象），但其内容组织却很像是一本参考书，因为其主题的次序很明确。这就使人不仅看第一遍时容易理解，而且也可以方便在将来作为参考书使用。而且，书后的快捷参考表也非常实用，我可以把这本书放在电脑旁随时查阅。最后，这本书的排版布局也很吸引人。虽然不是一本图画书，但它看起来也不像一本字典。其中包含了数量适当的辅助图像和屏幕截图，还通过彩色文本将代码与说明性文字区分开来（这一点对于中文版不重要，因为中英文自然可以明确区分。译者注）。

这本书是我能够向 CSS 初学者推荐的最好的一本书。我可以负责任地说，买这本书的 20 美元是我在学习 Web 设计过程中花得最值的。

2. By Bob Carpenter (New York, NY)

Not quite a designer’s or programmer’s book

This book falls short of being either a good design principle or case-study book or a good programming book. The final designs violate several common design principles, such as proximity, contrast and alignment. The programs are either so simple they hardly need explanation or so complex they’re beyond the scope of the book and simply linked. The book’s also full of typos, both in the code (e.g. missing parens and quotes, inconsistent naming, etc.) and the text (e.g. the closing paragraph says “hours of trying to make things work they way I wanted them”) and the figures (e.g. misaligned comments). This is a nice and easy read-it-once to get started book. I enjoyed it and may even recommend it to others. By contrast, I read Eric Meyer’s CSS book from O’Reilly, and it simply left me puzzled about the “why”. This book really helped by including longer case studies and seeing what’s required to make them compatible with all browsers. Something with even more case studies would be great, especially if there was multiple commentaries. The book has a strong authorial voice. As a positive, it reads as if you’re sitting next to a buddy who’s telling you how they do things. Wyke-Smith’s a funny and modest buddy who tells you who actually figured out all the crazy hacks (e.g. the “Holly IE6 Hack”, the “Alsett Clearing Method”, Doug Bowman’s “faux columns”, etc.). As a programmer, I found I could rewrite most of the examples to be simpler and more general. Or maybe it’s just that as of Firefox 1.0.7 and IE 6.0.3 things work that didn’t work in the versions used in the book: Firefox 0.8 and IE 6.0.2. For instance, I found I could clear floats from the next div in both IE and Firefox; there’s no need for a separate clear element in the markup or a special class name. I also don’t need examples of how to do three columns once I’ve been shown how to do two. As someone who studied some introductory design books, such as Williams’s excellent “The Non-Designers Design Book” and White’s less excellent but useful for case studies “Elements of Graphic Design”, I can’t say I was impressed with the author’s designs. In the final design in this book, I disliked the lack of top alignment of the three columns (seeminingly intentional), the crowding of the center column by the side-columns (also seemingly intentional and all-too-common on the web), the use of underlined paragraphs (not so common), all the weak broken line rules (seem to be a quirk of the author’s), and the lack of separation of the floated quote from the surrounding texts. Ironically, the book itself is beautifully designed and typeset, unlike the books on design. I object to the emphasis on fixed-width designs. Despite the author’s plea that CSS makes pages more accessible, if you want to make the fonts big, they’ll destroy the designs in this book (and most web sites). It’s not that hard to make everything scale by percentages or by relative measures such as ems, and I find it makes it much more robust to font resizing (which is an issue for me with a huge high-res monitor). In the end, I don’t think this is a book I’ll come back to. Not only is CSS changing rapidly, but even the reference material here is just reprinted (in a nicer format) from the w3schools web site.

称不上是设计者或程序员想看的书 （65人中的54人认为本评论有用）

本书既算不上一本好的设计原理或案例研究书，也算不上一本好的编程书。最后的设计违反了一些普通的设计原理，比如邻近（proximity）、对比（contrast）和排列（alignment）。其中的程序要么过于简单而几乎用不着解释，要么过于复杂超出了该书所讨论的范畴并简单地以链接解决问题。而且，书中到处都是错别字，代码中有（例如，落下括号和引号，不一致的命名等）、文字中有（例如，结尾一段中说“hours of trying to make things work they way I wanted them”），而且插图中也有（例如不一致的注释）。

不过，这本书倒是挺适合初学者看。这一点我比较满意，而且为此我要向大家推荐这本书。相对而言，我在看 O’Reilly 出版的 Eric Meyer 的 CSS 书时，则总是让我苦思冥想地考虑“为什么”。这本书通过较长的案例研究和考察如何使它们实现跨浏览器兼容的确对读者非常有帮助。如果例子再多一点也许会更好，特别是注释不要过于简单。

这本书强烈地体现出了作者的风格。从实际的角度讲，在看这本书时，就好像你坐在某人旁边听他的悉心指导。Wyke-Smith 是一个幽默谦虚的家伙，他甚至还告诉了你是谁发明的那些疯狂的 hack（例如“Holly IE6 Hack”、“Alsett Clearing Method”和 Doug Bowman 的“”faux columns”等等）。

作为一名程序员，我觉得可以重写大多数例子，使它们更简单而且更具有普适性。或者说，大概只是能在 Firefox 1.0.7 和 IE 6.0.3 中运行但却不能在书中所用浏览器－－Firefox 0.8 和 IE 6.0.2－－中运行的版本。比如说，我发现在 IE 和 Firefox 中，都可以在下一个 div 元素上面清除浮动，也就是说，没有必要在标记中额外添加单独的清除元素，或者指定一个类名。而且，在知道了如何构建两栏布局后，我也不需要如何构建三栏布局的例子了。

与一些研究设计的书相比，如 William 杰出的“The Non-Designers Design Book” 和 White 的虽不算杰出但却十分有用的案例学习书“Elements of Graphic Design”，我很难说作者的设计给我留下了深刻印象。对于这本书最后的设计而言，我讨厌三栏布局没有在顶部对齐（看起来似乎是有意的），两侧的栏布局使得中间栏显得拥挤不堪（同样好像是有意的，而且在 Web 中也很常见），给段落加下划线的用法（并不常见），所有平淡的虚线（像是作者的怪癖）以及没有将浮动的引用与周围的文本区分开来。具有讽刺意味的是，这本书自身的设计和排版倒是很精美，与书中所讲的设计形成了对比。

我反对强调固定宽度的设计。无论作者怎样辩解说 CSS 会使页面更具可访问性也无济于事，因为如果要将字体变大，那么就会破坏本书（以及多数网站）中的设计。而若要使得所有元素都能按比例缩放，通过百分比或相对度量单位（如 em）并不难做到，并且这样也使得调整字体大小时设计本身会更加健壮（这对于像我一样使用高分辨率显示器的人是一个需要考虑的问题）。

最后，我觉得自己没有必要再看这本书。不仅因为 CSS 变化很快，而且这里引用的资料也是 w3cshools 网站的翻版（格式倒不错）。