“I love
CSS!”

Do you feel confused about CSS?

You’re not alone.

Imagine how it would feel if you could make CSS do what you want without the pain:

• You could approach CSS with confidence instead of with a sense of dread.

• You could fix visual bugs uncovered by your product manager in record time, allowing you to go home early and avoid spending all evening trying to get that text to stop overflowing, damnit.

• The next time your company proposes a redesign, you could volunteer to take the lead on the project, allowing you to stand out from your colleagues and win over your boss (this was the exact tactic I used to get a promotion at my last employer)

Painless CSS will give you the tools to master CSS and write it with confidence.

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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 start 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.

Because there is no good resource that gives you a solid mental model for how CSS actually works from the ground up, you’re left copy/pasting stuff from Stack Overflow and hoping it works. No wonder it feels so painful to debug those exotic display issues.

Painless CSS is the well-explained, no-nonsense resource that you’ve been waiting for that gives you the real skills you need to write professional-grade CSS.

Why CSS skills matter

CSS is a hidden skill that separates the best software engineers from average ones. This is because using CSS to build user interfaces helps you learn the skills needed to work directly with users and understand their needs.

The engineering recruiting company Triplebyte analyzed what types of engineers get hired at Y Combinator companies. Their conclusion is clear: “Product Programmers”, those who are motivated by product design, get hired much more often than everyone else.

Top companies desperately want more “Product Programmers” because they have the skills to see things from a user’s perspective.

Engineering managers love developers who understand users. Working on web design with CSS is the best way to get into the user’s head and earn yourself a raise.

There are so few people who are true CSS experts, that it’s the easiest way to get an edge over your co-workers, especially if you are a recent grad. This was exactly what I did at my first job out of school—by solving tough CSS problems from day one, I convinced management to assign me to the most rewarding and impactful front-end projects, allowing me to get promoted to a senior position in just over a year, despite lacking the traditional pedigree.

Painless CSS starts from first principles and gives you the confidence to solve web design problems on your own without having to resort to brute trial and error.

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Who is this course for?

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.

While this course is supposedly about learning CSS, it’s really a course about how to develop the strong internal skills required to master any technical subject. You’ll benefit from this course if you have any of the following goals:

• You are an absolute beginner and want to learn CSS from scratch.

• You already know CSS and want to fill in the holes in your knowledge, or strengthen your mental models for how CSS works behind the scenes.

• You’ve been working with CSS for some time, but never really “got it”.

• You are non-technical, and want a better understanding of the technologies that your colleagues work with, so you can make better decisions when web design is involved.

Some examples:

• You are a student who wants to learn CSS to get your first job as a designer or a front-end developer.

• You are a programmer who graduated from a coding bootcamp, but are now finding that you need to work with CSS a lot in your job and your bootcamp didn’t teach you anything about CSS.

• You are an experienced back-end developer who wants to work on the front-end, but want to learn quickly using a resource that doesn’t waste months of your time.

• You are a designer who wants to learn more about the underlying web technologies to improve your design specs and reduce the chance of them coming back with tons of corrections.

Even if you don’t fit into any of the profiles above, you’ll find the mental models taught by this course useful for mastering a variety of technical subjects, such as: learning astrophysics, breaking into quantitative finance, building a bicycle, or just succeeding in the tech industry in general. 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. Painless CSS will show you how to do this.

What if I’m not a programmer?

Programmers are not the only folks who benefit from a strong understanding of CSS; here are some things you can accomplish after taking the course if you work in a non-technical role:

• Designers can build their own rapid prototypes for higher quality user feedback, and communicate easier with developers by speaking the same vocabulary.

• Growth Hackers and Marketers can do their own design tweaking and A/B testing to move faster. No more filing tickets on Jira and waiting 3 months for a response from engineering, while your competitor has already launched a new campaign.

• Product Managers can get a stronger sense of the timelines and resources required for each feature. You’ll be able to negotiate more effectively for a budget when you understand why your developers gave the time estimate they did.

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Frequently Asked Questions

There are lots of free resources already, why should I buy this course?

Free online CSS tutorials are not organized or curated in any way. I’ve seen too many people waste days or even months of their time trying to piece together their CSS knowledge based on free tutorials. Free resources help get you the answer once or twice, and can help you in a pinch, but they don’t help you build a solid foundation for actually understanding CSS beyond specific hacks that break too easily. Time is money after all, and buying a well-designed course can save you months of wasted effort.

In fact, the main reason I created this course in the first place was because many of my friends were extremely frustrated by the free tutorials out there, and the lack of a good, comprehensive course that teaches you foundational principles instead of quick and dirty tricks.

I’m not ready to buy right now. Do you have other options?

I understand if you are hesitant to buy right away—if you sign up for the email list you can get 3 free sample lessons to see if the content is right for you.

Note that the course is constantly evolving, and I will be raising the price as I add more lessons in the future. This is the best time to lock in the current price because you'll get all future updates to the course for free if you purchase it today.

I’m not a software developer / I’m a complete beginner. Should I read this book?

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 benefit from this course if you have any of the goals listed here.

What background knowledge should I have before starting the course?

No technical background knowledge or previous coding experience is required. Everything you need to learn to get started (including how to set up your text editor) is explained in the course.

What do you teach in the video course that is not taught in the book?

Not all of the book’s homework exercises have solutions, but the video course provides a complete guided walkthrough of every exercise, including the ones where the book merely provides an answer and not an explanation.

Science shows there is a phenomenon of illusory learning, where you feel like you are learning something but are not actually retaining it. To avoid this, you need to compare your practice exercises to an objective standard. The best resource for this is in the video course where I explain each answer fully so you can gain a complete understanding of why I arrived at each solution, instead of just getting the right answer and moving on.

What formats are the book available in?

If you purchase the book on Gumroad, it is available in .pdf, .epub, .mobi, and .azw3 (Amazon Kindle) formats. All DRM-free.

What will I learn in the sample lessons?

The sample lessons cover Lesson 1: HTML, Lesson 11: Box Model, Lesson 12: Document Flow, and Lesson 6: Parsing. Click here to get the sample lessons.

I have a question not covered here.

Sure! Ask me via email: ten.iemllib@llib

About the Author

Hey, I’m Bill Mei. 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 created this course 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 I 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.

Questions? Need help with ordering? Send me an email: ten.iemllib@llib