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How do I make my CSS fundamentals stronger?

ContraHacker
Go to solution Solved by Hi P,

@ContraHacker Courses will get you there quickly and for anything else not covered there's Google, you don't need books for CSS :D

 

Here's a good one [ LINK ]

Hello Everybody.

 

I keep coming back to LTT whenever I have a question, kinda feel guilty for questioning and not answering as much (or at all). Anyway,

 

I need to make my CSS fundamentals stronger. I have been learning node.js during this lock-down. I've come to the point where I can make server-less apps and APIs; yet my grasp on CSS is extremely weak. I need to understand the theory behind CSS. How to see the web page as CSS sees it if you know what I mean. Box theory, sizing, alignment, padding, flexbox... yada yada.

 

I'm clearly struggling with it. For instance, I tried to vertically center this red box (top-right corner) within the navbar for over an hour with no avail. :(. I know I could have hard-coded a margin value in pixels or as a percentage, but won't that be non-responsive?

 

image.thumb.png.f9bfad4812457dd033bb277545f674e7.png

 

What I'm trying to get at is, can anyone please suggest me a course, book, paper, etc., which I could use to learn CSS inside out? I feel like I'm missing something fundamental and crucial. Something like CSS theory. Kindly link me to any resource I could use (except of course w3schools, mozilla docs, etc. the usual stuff).

 

Thanks and stay safe.

 

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The O'Reilly CSS textbook is a fairly strong resource. On the cheaper side of textbooks

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11 minutes ago, ContraHacker said:

I keep coming back to LTT whenever I have a question, kinda feel guilty for questioning and not answering as much (or at all)

That's fine, some people only make an account to ask one question. Compared to them, you're great

 

For learning programming languages, I use sololearn. It's a free service that is pretty good. It may not teach what you're looking for, but it could be worth a try :)

(link) https://www.sololearn.com/

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7 minutes ago, Slottr said:

The O'Reilly CSS textbook is a fairly strong resource. On the cheaper side of textbooks

Looks great, I read the first few pages online. It's $31. May have to think about purchasing it. Thanks a lot!

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7 minutes ago, piratemonkey said:

That's fine, some people only make an account to ask one question. Compared to them, you're great

 

For learning programming languages, I use sololearn. It's a free service that is pretty good. It may not teach what you're looking for, but it could be worth a try :)

(link) https://www.sololearn.com/

Dang! That's a gold mine! Thanks! I'll start chipping away at it.

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I have yet to encounter a book that I can recommend as actually useful for solving everyday issues with CSS, which encompasses a large portion of the standard.  You're example of centering the box on the webpage is a fairly common example of much of the horrible documentation CSS has, such that even simple problems become an utter nightmare when trying to solve them.

If anyone is aware of any books that actually are fairly comprehensive of CSS and provide practical information, I'd love to hear about them.  The majority of the ones that I've seen that actually are useful are usually extremely focused, and the ones that actually are comprehensive tend to be the equivalent of the Haynes manuals for car repairs.

 

My recommendation would be to pickup a fairly comprehensive and recent book on CSS (preferably used), and when you encounter a problem, search on StackOverflow.

 

One tip I can give you from my experience with CSS is that you can have cases where you're stylings conflict, which make it even harder to diagnose if you're solution is working.  So when you are trying to come up with a solution, I strongly recommend using scratchpads to test you're solutions (i.e.  create a separate html file which includes NONE of your other code, and test you're solution there).

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@JacobFW That's rather surprising. Given that CSS is... well CSS - used to frequently. I'll definitely take your advice of using scratchpads. I own a McGraw Hill publications' HTML and CSS Reference (Author: Powell, 5th Edition), but it's more or less only a reference. I'll be on a hunt for good CSS books (I could even write one. ;)) and I'll try to remember to share it here on this forum.

 

Cheers.

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@Hi P Turns out I already own this course, never got around to starting it. Feels almost the same as your typical steam library; yes, I bought a bunch of games and yes, I haven't gotten round to playing them. Thanks for your reply, I'll get on it. (And hopefully not spend all my time playing Far Cry 5 and Life is Strange.) :) 

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