Before I get this review of Dave Shea's book The Zen of CSS Design started, let me get an important disclosure and a shameless name drop out of the way as they kind of go together anyway. I had the good fortune of attending the FITC conference here in Toronto back at the end of April where Dave did a great presentation about web standards at the crack of dawn. So, to cut the story short, he kindly gave me a copy of his book to peruse. Thanks Dave. So, you could say I'm both shameless and somewhat biased — although had I not liked the book I would probably have just not written a review at all and found some other way to drop Dave's name publicly.

To tell the truth, I wasn't sure exactly what to expect from The Zen of CSS Design. I had followed the launch of the The CSS Zen Garden website and some of the entries there are impressive examples of what a bit of good CSS knowledge and a lot of imagination can accomplish. However, I wasn't sure exactly how one would translate those examples into a book that would provide more than one would get just going to the site and examining the code yourself.

Well, Dave and Molly Holzshlag have done an outstanding job. Instead of choosing examples from The Garden and then discussing them (as I assumed would be done), they've written a CSS guidebook punctuated by examples gleaned from the site. The book is one of the best tutorials on CSS I've read. The basic idea is that they've chosen key topics in CSS and then elaborated on them by closely examining a pertinent example from the collection for each topic. And, it works extremely well.

One great example of the depth of their writing that I especially like is the chapter on typography. Drawing on some stellar examples from The Garden, the authors address key issues of web typography from contrast and legibility to limited type choices and image replacement techniques. The structure of the book makes these correlations between example and content surpisingly unforced. The authors also add depth to their examples by not simply dictating one method of accomplishing something but instead describing the pros and cons of each choice and where certain choices might be favoured. Scalability of text, for instance, is adressed in connection with Shaun Inman's entry. The authors describe technically how Shaun achieved his interesting design and then they debate the reasons why one should be cautious of using such fixed-sized text in many instances and how type varies on the web. The discussion is both simple and in-depth enough that even experienced designers will find a few valuable nuggets or arguments posed in a new and enlightening way.

This method of teaching the pros and cons is something I really liked in Dan Cederholm's book Web Standards Solutions and I think both of these books have a ton to offer. For the aspiring CSS designer or the seasoned CSS wrangler, both of these books will find a spot on your desk (not on your bookshelf). And, according to Dave the sales of The Zen of CSS Design are going phenomonally well, so a lot of designers probably already know what I've been raving about. The book is well worth the modest $55 CAD list price (which I admittedly didn't have to pay). Great job Dave and Molly!

Morning Update: This morning a coworker of mine pointed out that there were a number of negative reviews of The Zen of CSS Design on Amazon.com so I went to check them out. It's curious, most of the negative opinions came from people who were specifically looking for technical tips, tricks, and hacks for CSS and were disapointed. Too bad. The whole idea of The Zen Garden project was not to show technical ability but to show the mesh of technical ability with creativity and aesthetic sensibility — something that had been lacking in the CSS community and still does to some extent. Kudos to Molly and Dave for writing a book that brings technique and design together in a meaningful way. Yeah, if you just want to learn syntax go buy Eric Meyer's fine books, but I think The Zen of CSS is a better book for actual web design.