CSS tutorials?

May 19, 2010 12:38 PM

Best CSS tutorials that is not w3wschools.com. Ideally, it would be in the format of something like Adobe Classroom in a Book, where there are actual exercises of increasing complexity. I have a basic understanding of CSS, but need to delve more into using it for positioning.
posted by Unnecessarily Sarcastic Bitch to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Definitely check out Smashing Magazine. They're a blog, so you might have to hunt around a bit (on the CSS tag page) for what you need, but generally they give extremely good CSS tutorials based around sticky topics like negative margins, specificity, z-index, pseudo-selectors, backgrounds, fixed v. fluid layout, image sprites, and floats. Their book was disappointing, though. Good chapters on layout and typography but the rest of it is all marketing stuff.

In my experience, the hardest bits are understanding floats, the box model, pseudo-selectors and inheritance, and (of course) all the little ways you need to placate IE. w3schools.com is actually really useful once you understand the concepts involved and just need a attribute reference. And get really comfortable with the element inspection functionality of Firebug or Chrome's developer tools -- those will take half the mystery out of any CSS problem (but only half). Have fun!
posted by cowbellemoo at 1:08 PM on May 19, 2010 [1 favorite]

floatutorial helped me a lot
posted by bendybendy at 1:49 PM on May 19, 2010

I learned a lot with Westciv's Hands on CSS tutorial. You might want to start from point 9, "Page Layout".

I also like Web Standards Solutions by Dan Cederholm. It starts introducing several different topics (lists, tables, forms, etc) and then you can create a CSS Layout using these elements.
My edition has some outdated CSS hacks (for IE5, for example) which I don't use anymore, but I still refer to it now and then.

Also, I found this positioning tutorial to understand the basics of CSS positioning.
posted by clearlydemon at 1:54 PM on May 19, 2010

I always recommend Css Tricks. His screencasts, particularly.
posted by backwards guitar at 2:21 PM on May 19, 2010

lynda.com is the best online source for classes, it's subscription based though.
posted by TheBones at 2:56 PM on May 19, 2010