Book Review: CSS Hacks & Filters

April 24th, 2006

Joseph W. Lowery’s book, CSS Hacks & Filters, makes a great effort towards amassing all the current CSS Hacks available on-line and explaining their appropriate usage. To a great extent this volume succeeds in making order out of chaos and I heartily recommend its use as a supplemental resource for anyone who does not want to bookmark every CSS Hack Web page they might find useful.

While Lowery’s clear explanations of the rationale and appropriate application of each hack adds significant worth to this book, the real distinction between CSS Hacks & Filters and other CSS volumes I own is its focus on implementing CSS design with Dreamweaver’s internal template engine. This can be a real time saver for those new to Dreamweaver’s template engine and/or CSS.

CSS Hacks covers tasks like using Javascript/DOM to serve appropriate style sheets to various browsers, server side solutions for CSS, CSS based navigation systems, and image scaling with CSS. In addition, it includes several example templates that have been broadly tested on current browsers and that can provide a more secure foundation for your cross-browser design project than your own untested layout. Lowery also includes a detailed appendix that lists the various CSS Hacks/Filters and their applications.

This book is an excellent resource for those beginning CSS, especially if they are interested in Dreamweaver and Web development or scripting languages like Javascript, PHP, or ColdFusion.

You can find a bit more information about the author at his Flashbang! Web site.