Book excerpt: Advanced Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates (CSS & XHTML) is the must-have book for advanced designers who want to expand their skills and improve the quality of their designs. Learning CSS technology and continually improving one's design and developer skills is becoming increasingly essential for every Web designer in today's marketplace. This book teaches designers and developers how to bridge the knowledge gap from XHTML table-based design to full CSS-based design, and master the technologies and techniques needed. But the book isn't just about the theory behind design; it's about putting it into practice right away. Using the ~140 customizable designs, designers can use what they learn immediately. This indispensable collection of designs includes 20 CSS-driven templates, 80 XHTML table-based templates, 10 e-newsletter templates, 10 signature templates, and 20 Photoshop designs that can be coded. Too see some of the sample templates that come on the book's companion CD, visit the author's Web site at http://www.a5design.com/a5-book-designs. The book goes well beyond the authors' very successful Professional Web Design: Techniques and Templates by providing advanced tools and techniques that teach how e-commerce and shopping carts work, explain the concept of database-driven sites, and show how to create relative sizing designs, among other important topics. The techniques are taught with an emphasis on CSS, including explanations, examples, and templates that go far beyond existing CSS documentation. The database-driven and e-commerce examples in the book are written using CFML (ColdFusion Markup Language). Because the purpose of this book is to give a high-level explanation of such techniques, the techniques can be easily translated to other languages, such as ASP/ASP.Net, JSP, and PHP. This is a unique training course and free library of templates all in one!