“Writing CSS sucks!”—you used to say, before you read this book.

The dirty secret is that under the hood, CSS is a straightforward, intuitive language that is a joy to work with once you are taught the right way to master CSS and write it with confidence.

Both beginners and experts alike are guaranteed to learn something new and useful in these pages—it doesn't matter if you've never coded before or are already a front-end veteran.

It’s not your fault if you haven’t yet learned the easy way to write CSS: they never told you in your university CS classes (or at your bootcamp course) how important CSS is when you started working at a real job delivering real products. As a result, you’re pressured to ship CSS at your work where you don’t have time to learn the fundamentals.

Worse, the existing CSS resources out there are very technical and assume you already know how browser C++ rendering engines work, which is not at all approachable.

Painless CSS gives you the best mental models to learn CSS, and supplies you with a strong foundation to figure out how to solve web design problems on your own without having to resort to brute trial and error.

In this book, you’ll find:

• The Five Steps to Painless CSS: a step-by-step checklist you can use to fix any visual bug you encounter; even the weird, confusing ones.
• The CSS Specificity Tournament: a simple mental model to destroy specificity issues forever—you won’t find this explained anywhere else.
• Over 30 hands-on, interactive, and fun homework exercises to strengthen your newfound CSS skills.
• A companion code repo with over 60 code samples and solutions.
• A complete reference to the most common HTML tags and CSS styles you’ll need to work with on a day-to-day basis.
• Hidden bonus chapters that share some of my career secrets to using your new skills to get ahead in the tech industry.
• A complete description of how each line of CSS you write is rendered in clear, jargon-free language that doesn’t require background knowledge.
• Tips on writing clean, maintainable CSS that boosts your SEO ranking and improves your accessibility.
• ...and much, much more!

While this book is supposedly about learning CSS, it’s really a book about how to develop the strong internal skills required to master any technical subject.

You’ll find this book useful no matter if you are trying to learn astrophysics, break into quantitative finance, build a bicycle, or want to succeed in the tech industry. This is because all technical subjects benefit from the principle of decomposing a topic into its constituent parts and then developing good intuitions for how these parts congeal to form a coherent whole.

For years, I've been consulting for software startups to help them ship beautiful web design. But I got tired of seeing people make the same mistakes with CSS and then giving up after all the existing free online tutorials failed them.

I wrote this book to share with you my secrets for writing maintainable, easy-to-understand CSS that is a joy to work with—secrets that my clients normally pay hundreds of dollars an hour for! But I am tired of broken, ulcer-inducing code popping up everywhere and am sharing these secrets with you because I want CSS to finally shed its undeserved reputation and rise from the ashes as the beautiful programming language that it is. Painless CSS is the well-explained, no-nonsense resource that you've been waiting for that will help you see this too.

Learn more at www.painlesscss.com