Are you like me in that you’ve been using CSS for three or four years now…and, you’re definitely able to rock it…but, if you want to get really honest…you just sort of get by with it…meaning, yea, you can design web pages, and, you understand CSS; but, you know pretty well that you’re not utilizing its full powers…and, though you recognize what does what…you really don’t know the terminology?

Gee, that was a pretty long question with pretty of ellipses … so, anyway, that’s the category I fall in…and, when I had the recent need to tweak the hell out of a particular Wordpress theme…I decided it was time to really master these style sheets. Over at Borders there were about ten books on the topic. I chose CSS The Missing Manual by David Sawyer McFarland. I pretty much mastered most of Dreamweaver’s functionality by using his Missing Manual on that…so, it seemed like a pretty reasonable choice.

Take the term selectors for instance…I never really used this term: in conversation or in my mind. But, the selector is just the part outside the brackets: either the tag or the class or id … that’s all….. and all the rules or instructions for the selector… that’s called a declaration block.

This book has about 400 pages. I figure I can rip through it in 8 days by reading 50 pages a day. Not bad. And, then I should be a CSS ninja. I may type some of my notes into here too. It should be useful for the sort of advanced-beginner CSS ninja-wannabees out there!

And, when you format the different states of links…something that you’ve probably done before…well, those are called pseudo-classes. Another cool thing I read about was how to use the :first-child selector to format the very first element in a list…very cool.

when you see this

margin: 0px 20px

that means that top and bottom are 0px
and right and left are 20px