disassembler-deactivated2011041 asked: How did you go about learning CSS? Classes, self-taught via online tutorials and forums, etc? I'm a self-taught beginner, got any tips or good advice?

me and css are a relationship that’s been many, many years in the making. here is a summary:

• my first experience with markup was on AOL profiles. you could change colors and hide the labels and make cute ascii bunnies kissing or whatever. i think it used basic HTML, but that meant nothing to me then. as far as i was concerned, there was something you put before your text, and something you put after. this made stuff happen.
• then came AOL homepages. like any good pre-teen, i filled mine up with song lyrics. but four colors and four fonts just wasn’t enough. i needed more. hello “advanced homepage editor”!
• then came angelfire (it had better adkills than geocities) which is where i started making my first framed websites. this was about 7th grade. the bulk of learning from the beginning until now was viewing the source code of websites and trying to figure out how stuff was done.
• within the year, i learned about CSS but totally missed the point of it. i put my stylesheet, manually, in every single page of every site i made.
• way too long after that, i saw the light and started linking to ONE stylesheet. this was a groundbreaking moment in my life (so was installing greymatter)
• i dicked around at this level for a long time, but still used iframes. and sometimes image maps. everything i did was for personal projects and “just to do it”. no structural CSS knowledge yet.
• a very artsy, experimental phase happened sometime around here. i’d use dropdown menus, styled, to display poetry and textareas to do all sorts of inappropriate things that they aren’t intended to do.
• fast forward to college. all of a sudden knowing how to make websites was REALLY COOL, so i had to step my game up. this is when i started reading tutorials, and refining everything i knew. i started being aware of ‘good practice’ and theory and took up an interest in U.I. stuff.
• i got my first part-time web designer job in college. this was the first time someone else was going to look at my code. i was terrified, and rightly so. my boss told me this was awesome, but way too ‘homebrewed’. this was a huge turning point.
• in the year and change that i worked there, i learned and refined probably as much as the sum of all prior years.

for advice, that could easily be another post in and of itself. and i will make it, soon! all i can say briefly is: don’t worry about the w3c validator.

for people i’ve taught personally, the process usually starts with having them mock up their dream site. then i’ll go over what does and doesn’t translate to the web well, and why. then we modify it, refine it, and i walk them through coding it up. it’s far more effective than abstract tutorials and book chapters.