How This Book Is Organized ..........................................................................
The overall goal of CSS Web Design For Dummiesis to provide an enjoyable
and understandable guide for the CSS designer. This book is accessible to
people with little or no CSS experience.The book is divided five parts. But just because the book is organized doesn’t
mean you have to be. You don’t have to read the book in sequence from
Chapter 1 to the end, just as you don’t have to read a cookbook in sequence.In fact, if you want to see what’s coming up in CSS3, just go to Chapter 15
right away.If you want to find out how to create well-designed Web pages without resort-
ing to the traditional HTML tables to hang your elements on, just flip over to
Chapter 12, which explains how to build pages using only CSS positioning fea-
tures. You’re not expected to know what’s in Parts I or II to get results in Part
III. Similarly, within each chapter, you can often scan the headings and jump
right to the section covering the task that you want to accomplish. No need
to read each chapter from start to finish. I’ve been careful to make all the
examples and CSS code as self-contained as possible. Each of them works,
too. They’ve been thoroughly tested.All of the source code for all the examples in this book is downloadable from
this book’s Web site at http://www.dummies.com/go/csswebdesign.The following sections give you a brief description of the book’s five
main parts.Part I: The ABCs of CSS .........................................................................
This first Part introduces CSS, explaining its purposes and fundamental
nature. You see how common tasks are accomplished and find out all about
the elements of CSS design. You also discover how CSS improves on HTML
and find out how to build practical style sheets for real-world Web site solu-
tions. You figure out how to think beyond HTML — putting together Web
pages that have style and grace — all because of the added power that CSS
gives a designer. Topics in this part include starting from scratch, migrating
from HTML to CSS, understanding the meaning of thecascade,and getting
your feet wet with the major building blocks of CSS behavior: selectors and
inheritance. You also consider what kind of editor (if any) you might want to
use to assist you in building CSS styles.8 CSS Web Design For Dummies
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