Books are a great reference tool and will help us throughout our developer journey. A CSS book can help us to get started quickly with glossaries, walkthroughs, visuals, and troubleshooting guides. To gain expertise and become a master developer we should read books. Books give us an overall view of the programming language or specific technology. It is often overwhelming and confusing to decide which book to pick when we have millions of them. Our list includes the 20 best books that all developers must-read to create great websites.
1. CSS For Beginners: The Best CSS Guide For Beginners To Learn Learn CSS in One Day and Developing a Strong Coding Foundation by Ethan Hall
It covers a lot of features when it comes to modifying the appearance of any elements on the website. Sometimes choosing what to learn can be a challenge, because it continuously evolves. If we are a web developer and want to style our website that will attract users by spending less effort and time than this book is for us.
2. Beginning CSS Web Development: From Novice to Professional by Simon Collison
Beginning CSS Web Development by Simon Collison is the perfect beginners’ guide to CSS. As the subtitle says, the book is about taking us from novice to professional by the time we are finished. This book is laid out very well and moves at a perfect pace.
3. CSS in Depth 1st Edition by Keith J. Grant
A very well-written book about the professional application of CSS. If we are experienced CSS Designers looking to extend our knowledge and techniques, this book will show us some creative ideas most likely new to us. This type of book is one of the best for learning web development.
4. CSS Secrets: Better Solutions to Everyday Web Design Problems 1st Edition by Lea Verou
A must-read for web designers and front-end developers. Each chapter presents a specific web design “problem” as well as a CSS solution. Some are simple, others are quite complex. Many are quite clever and will make us think of CSS differently. It’s well-written and beautifully designed, with full-colour pages and tons of informative footnotes.
5. CSS Programming Complete Guide: Learn the fundamentals of CSS and Web designing in one book! Kindle Edition by Fahmid Chowdhury
This is the best CSS book, the book is filled with amazing graphics and designs that will help us understand the concepts better than any other book out there.
6. CSS Pocket Reference: Visual Presentation for the Web by Eric A. Meyer
This is an excellent pocket guide. It is concise and up to date. In addition, it provides answers to common queries about CSS concepts, properties, and selectors.
7. CSS: The Definitive Guide: Visual Presentation for the Web 4th Edition by Eric Meyer & Estelle Weyl
This is THE must-own CSS book. It covers everything about CSS we can imagine, including full coverage of CSS Grid, which is going to change everything. The table of contents is presented in a very detailed format along with page numbers. To find something, we can easily just look at the Table of Contents and then flip to the page.
8. Web development: Web design with CSS by Andy Vickler
Whether we are learning CSS coding to build our website or we are professional web designers, this book will help us to learn CSS coding faster. This book is filled with easy coding samples and step-by-step instructions to help us learn CSS coding.
9. CSS Master 3rd Edition by Tiffany B Brown
This book will show us how to write better, more efficient CSS, and to use the plethora of the new cutting-edge CSS features available to the front-end developer. This book is easy to follow and understand.
10. CSS3: The Missing Manual Third Edition by David Sawyer McFarland
This book is very well done. The author went to a lot of effort to create tutorials in each chapter that allow us to see the effects of CSS properties in an incremental manner. This book is very well written and great understanding of CSS. The author explains the concepts and then takes us through a hand’s exercise that lets us see how it works.
11. CSS Visual Dictionary by Greg Sidelnikov
This is a great book for understanding the concepts of CSS. There are tons of images that help show how the HTML item will look after writing the different CSS properties and values. This is a good book if we are looking for taking advantage of the new CSS properties such as FlexBox and Grid this book has great visual examples and it’s well explained.
12. Stylin’ with CSS: A Designer’s Guide (Voices That Matter) 3rd Edition by Charles Wyke-Smith
‘Stylin’ with CSS’ gives the reader a solid understanding of many of the CSS rules that, in the beginning, baffle a designer. This book is a great example of a well-written and beautifully designed technical reference book. It is a fantastic resource for learning CSS. The examples are well-illustrated, and the author writes with clarity, enthusiasm and humour.
13. CSS Mastery 3rd ed. Edition by Andy Budd & Emil Björklund
This book is an up-to-date and comprehensive overview of advanced CSS. There’s a lot of good information, and there are lots of references to websites and standards documents for more detailed information.
14. Learning Web Design: A Beginner’s Guide to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Web Graphics by Jennifer Robins
Great book to get anyone started in learning the basics of frontend Web development. This book is also excellent for developers that need to have a better grounding across all web technology.
15. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript All in One by Julie C. Meloni and Jennifer Kyrin
This is an excellent book to learn client-side web development, including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This book was perfect – from cover to cover it’s filled with clear, instructive, chatty coverage of just about every front-end tool and technology. Specifically, the book explains how HTML, CSS, and JavaScript work together in contemporary web development, followed by step-by-step tutorials on how to utilize the three technologies simultaneously.
16. Stunning CSS3: A Project-Based Guide to the Latest in CSS (Voices That Matter) 1st Edition by Zoe Mickley Gillenwater Gillenwater
There is no better book for anyone who has some web design experience and wishes to polish it with the latest version of Cascading Style Sheets. Each chapter walks us through standalone exercises that we can integrate into projects we’re working on, or use as inspiration.
17. CSS: Basic Fundamental Guide for Beginners by MG Martin
With this book, we can familiarize ourselves with how CSS works, learn how to efficiently work with CSS selectors, and apply what we’ve learned to create beautifully styled simple web pages.
18. Modern CSS with Tailwind: Flexible Styling without the Fuss by Noel Rappin
Tailwind CSS is an exciting new CSS framework that allows us to design our site by composing simple utility classes to create complex effects. With Tailwind, we can style our text, move our items on the page, design complex page layouts, and adapt our design for devices from a phone to a wide-screen monitor.
19. CSS in easy steps 4th Edition by Mike McGrath
This book explains how Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) determine the presence of elements in HTML documents. Style sheet rules are used to control how content appears and how it animates, and to provide dynamic effects using animations, transitions, and transformations. We will also learn how to design responsive web pages that look great viewed on any device. Each chapter builds our knowledge of style sheets.
20. Learn CSS in One Day and Learn It Well (Includes HTML5): CSS for Beginners with Hands-on Project by Jamie Chan
This little book teaches the foundation of CSS, and it does it well. Jamie Chan has an excellent way to teach the essentials, his writing style is approachable, even to the novice.