Best way to learn/master CSS
 

Ive done plenty of tutorials over years and used CSS in many pages, but still feel I need to increase my knowledge and am wondering about taking a class or something or should I just stick with self teaching method?

In an effort to keep up with the times I am in the process of increasing my expertise and CSS happens to be on the platter at this time.

Ive looked at a few books and as mentioned even online classes,... anyone with any advice?

w3schools seems to be best online resource, but im not against the idea of class room and being taught stuff too.

:thumbsup

Get a front page designed, cut images and then try assembling it with divs

if that's the kind of design you've got, basically a huge image you cut into pieces, may as well still use tables - makes no difference at all.

this is what is frustrating.

I can sit for hours trying to hack away on something, and it begins to frustrate me as I wish I was just taught how to do something by someone who can teach and who knows the topic.

online tutorials are okay but always feel I could learn more. I looked up classes there arent really "css" classes it seems... or at least I cant find them LOL

Click through here and look at the source code for the different layouts.

http://www.csszengarden.com/

This one has some good info for getting started, but you're past that I'm sure:

http://www.cssbasics.com/

this is a good site

http://thinkvitamin.com/

The best and most comprehensive book I bought a few months ago was 'CSS The Missing Manual' 2nd edition. Now I don't struggle anymore with css.

My girl has this book on her desk right now.

thats one of the books ive thought of ordering recently.

so many CSS books are out of date now it seems, or dont have good reviews.

so im gathering most agree self teaching is the way to go? heheh

Thanks for links, am looking at them all right now... keep the advice coming please

best way really is to read all the tutorials people put out.

better than books really.

if you leave your email i can send you a few good places.

I can't stop looking at his hair! :1orglaugh

http://teamtreehouse.com/topics/introduction/design

cool link :)

i hear ya, i like books though because I end up reading them more than just when sitting at desk. But i agree online tutorials have taught me many different thing, always looking to improve though. I wanna take it to next level and am willing to go sit in class room if I must.

fletchxxx @ gmail

handy feature "inspect element" through context menu in Chrome or with FireBug plugin/extension

once you get grip on positioning and floats and how thing stack up depending on various position & display settings, it becomes easy.

my personal fav is absolute positioned item in a relative positioned item


in css you can refer to classes and ids very flexibly, you can refer to particular tag in particular class/id for instance.

never use same id more than once on a single page.

for a quick job like some gallery - it is a 'decent' solution as it can be done quickly without needing to know much about html standards.

slicing sites with tables that go in templates of some CMS - worse possible practice, breaking table rows and table cells throughout various templates, or when generating rows, with tables you have to add logic to account row generation and then cell generation. real intend of a table is to present data where one row equals one dataset (recordset) like in database tables or spreadsheets.

If you are anything like myself, you are probably extremely visible.

I would recommend getting a monthly subscription to Lynda.com with their video tutorials.
I personally loved their tutorials and learned a shit load from them. Two years ago I knew how to use photoshop and Dreamweaver with minimal CSS skills. To date, Ino longer use a visual editor, only TextMate, and have self taught myself html, improved photoshop skills, illustrator, advanced css, jquery, ajax, advanced php, wordpress & drupal developing, incorporating xml / json, basic python and ruby on rails, and tons of smaller cool things such as php frameworks. I went from being able to create static galleries to fully interactive web applications. The more you learn, the more fresh your ideas become. Exposing my brian to logical thinking with programming has actually improved my designing greatly in a strange way.

Learn to control the DOM and your life will change.

Here are the CSS tutorials from Lynda: http://www.lynda.com/search?q=css&x=0&y=0
Also check out nettuts, they have some great premium tutorials.

Video tutorials changed my life. Literally.

Also, DO NOT get caught up in only watching videos. Actually DO them. You need to physically type these teachings over and over for them to sink in. After awhile it becomes so easy. Not to be insulting at all, but people talking about using tables instead of CSS is mind boggling now after mastering CSS. I could throw together a much better CSS gallery layout in about 3-5 minutes than any table could ever produce.

CSS is so incredibly easy. You could get quite good at it within days if you put in the hours.

zoxxa thanks for that post, pretty much where i am.

Encouraging.

is that the way web design should be done, design the whole page as one piece and then cut it up and then reassemble it with css?

here is a free course that was just released by envato

http://i.imgur.com/Kz0V8.jpg

http://learncss.tutsplus.com/

First understand the theory, called the "box model" before getting too much into howtos for specific tasks and especially tricks or workarounds for specific problems. W3c probably has a good explanation of the box model so you'll understand WHY things behave as they do. Understanding tje big picture of how the whole thing is put together and should really help.

After that, one tip is to temporarily put borders on your major boxes so you can visually see the boxes as you work on a design.

Lastly, 90% of CSS problems are too much CSS, some rule that should be taken away rather than something that should be added. A browser's job is to make semantic html (meaningful tags) look reasonably good even in the absence of any CSS. Start by giving the browser a chance to do it's job, then add CSS only as necessary to adjust what the browser does naturally.