CSS: The Definitive Guide, Fifth Edition

If you're a web designer or app developer interested in sophisticated page styling, improved accessibility, and less time and effort expended, this book is for you. This revised fifth edition provides a comprehensive guide to CSS implementation along with a thorough review of the latest CSS specifications.

Authors Eric Meyer and Estelle Weyl show you how to improve user experience, speed development, avoid potential bugs, and add life and depth to your applications through layout, transitions and animations, borders, backgrounds, text properties, and many other tools and techniques. We read the specs so you don't have to!

Browse the Figures

As with the previous edition, about 99% of the figures in the Fifth Edition are direct captures from web browsers. All the files used to create them are available on GitHub Pages, and you can fork or clone the base repository if desired.

Where To Order

oreilly.com (official publisher's catalog information with links to popular retail sites)

Changes from the Fourth Edition

Almost too many to list! The chapters have been reworked and reordered, with pseudo-classes and -elements getting their own chapter. Subgrid, conic gradients, logical properties, container queries, cascade layers, and much more are included along with almost all the information found in previous editions. Because there was so much new material, the reference appendices found in the fourth edition had to be dropped. Instead, this edition has a single short appendix listing online resources. And the cover breaks with two decades of tradition to show off a new design aesthetic!

Table of Contents

  1. CSS Fundamentals
  2. Selectors
  3. Pseudo-Class and -Element Selectors
  4. Specificity and the Cascade
  5. Values and Units
  6. Basic Visual Formatting
  7. Padding, Borders, Outlines, and Margins
  8. Backgrounds
  9. Gradients
  10. Floating and Positioning
  11. Flexible Box Layout
  12. Grid Layout
  13. Table Layout in CSS
  14. Fonts
  15. Text Properties
  16. Lists and Generated Content
  17. Transforms
  18. Transitions
  19. Animation
  20. Filters, Blending, Clipping, and Masking
  21. CSS At-Rules
  1. Additional Resources