Totally this ^^^. I still battle with CSS. I have no love for it but the best way I've found to approach it is to have some idea of what I want to achieve visually and work from there. Almost everything one would seek to achieve has been done by $someone and is out there on the internet. Steal it! Sometimes it's blog posts, sometimes I just scrape other sites (modern browser really help here). But yup, grid, box, floats. MDN rocks.

Speaking of battles, I’ve liked trying CSS Battle’s challenges. Kevin Powell and some others have YouTube videos where they compete but it’s not really that competitive.

Don’t worry about minimizing the number of characters, try to match the challenges 100% with just enough HTML and just enough CSS rules and properties to be elegant.

https://cssbattle.dev/

> Don't waste time reading a book

Somewhere on the continuum between "learn by doing" and "learn by studying", the truth lies.

I mostly learned CSS by happenstance "doing" and have been able to do a fair bit, but I didn't really understand selectors until I went through a book on CSS.

There is a good MDN page on CSS selectors that takes about 5 minutes to read. Sorry you wasted time reading a whole book! You can't get that time back.

> There is a good MDN page on CSS selectors that takes about 5 minutes to read.

I've read that page! In fact I reviewed it while reading the book, along with many other MDN pages.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/CSS/Building_...

That page is actually part of an MDN module, which is sort of like a book. I actually considered going through that MDN module methodically, but ultimately chose a book I thought was more suitable for my needs.

For me, developing a sense of mastery over selectors meant studying all their variations and practicing with all of them. I also had to understand that "selectors" were a thing in the first place — a coherent and scope-limited topic that I could study and master. I didn't really get that from all of my CSS practice — the book gave me an agenda I wasn't able to develop on my own.

> Sorry you wasted time reading a whole book! You can't get that time back.

It's not like it was an entire book on selectors. I don't need that time back — it was productive, and I learned a lot about many aspects of CSS.

Of course, it would have been less productive if I had not already accumulated a lot of knowledge via the "learn by doing" method. I'm certainly not opposed to that... it's jarring to see someone so adamantly opposed to books.

(For the curious, the book was Architecting CSS by Martine and Michael Dowden. It's not really a beginner book. I chose it because I needed to understand how to organize CSS in large projects to get more predictable behavior and reduce time spent on maintenance and debugging).

> Don't waste time reading a book

I’m guessing you have little experience with books but the general approach is you read something and then practice what you just learned.