When comparing A List Apart vs CSS-Tricks, the Slant community recommends A List Apart for most people. In the question“What are the best blogs about front-end development?” A List Apart is ranked 1st while CSS-Tricks is ranked 2nd. The most important reason people chose A List Apart is:
A List Apart has a difficult [review process](http://alistapart.com/about/contribute) for their articles that insures well written, helpful articles from established industry professionals.
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Pros
Pro High quality writing
A List Apart has a difficult review process for their articles that insures well written, helpful articles from established industry professionals.
Pro Topics cover a wide range
A List Apart covers a range of topics beneficial to those learning web design, with some topics having 100's of posts that cover the category. Categories include Process, Content, Industry and more.
Pro Examples are well explained
All posts, whether they are written by Chris Coyier or a guest blogger, are very clear and well explained. Each example has code snippets with easy-to-follow explanations of the code and theory behind the specific concept. Possible issues you may run into with the code are often addressed, so you know how to tackle bugs that may pop up.
Pro Codepen makes code review easy
Pro Frequently updated
CSS-Tricks is extremely active, being updated every day or two with a new blog post. Despite the frequency of the posts, the quality always remains high.
Cons
Con Not as relevant anymore
In recent years, the site's content has shifted from talking about real-world examples, nuances and discussions about low-level ideas to generalizations and overall, commonly accepted theories about web design.
Con Not a good starting place for a complete beginner
CSS-Tricks does not follow the structure of a traditional tutorial, starting at the basics and gradually increasing in difficulty.
Instead, each blog post addresses a specific topic (such as responsive images, debugging keyframe animations etc.). Therefore it's better suited to someone who has already been introduced to CSS and is looking for more info on a specific topic, or wants to discover new concepts.