Rating:  - Good Start
This book helped me learn CSS. I think it is well written and well organized. If you go through it in a single day and try out what you've learned, the theory and methods come together very well.
This book seems to get the reader in and out quickly enough to make learning CSS more approchable, yet it is well-written and detailed enough to be useful for those already having some experience with HTML or web development.
As a prerequisite, you should probably have an understanding of HTML and be able to create and view HTML and CSS documents.
Rating:  - Not disappointed nor give over approval
I bought this book for one reason, to get a basic understanding of CSS. Getting an overall view of CSS and some examples gets done in this book. In depth of CSS, don't know. I can get a deeper understanding by searching the web. I was looking for some basic discription and examples and I got that. I read some of the other views, agreed "The Definitive Guide" is a bit much. I would think that the book would be a lot thicker wiht that title. I would probably buy it again under the same circumstance.
Rating: - Short Review of CSS Definitive Guide (2nd Edition)
If you have some experience creating web pages and have a reasonably good grasp of HTML and are really serious about getting deep into CSS, this would be a really good book to do that with.
On the other hand, if you're looking for a CSS cook book or for a basic CSS tutorial for beginners, this is not the book for you.
While not a CSS expert, I've been using CSS to develop websites for a number of years. I've found this book most valuable in deepening my understanding of CSS.
If you want more detail, you could take a look at my somewhat longer review on the Oakland Perl Mongers site.
George Woolley of Camelot.pm and Oakland.pm
Rating:  - Disappointed
I was really expecting to enjoy this book, but I am now having trouble finishing it. The author seems to enjoy telling us how much he knows about CSS and not how we can apply the subject to our own web designs. I also think the book needed some kind of editor or proofreader. Take the following snippet:
"The left (or right) outer edge of a floated element must be to the right (or left) of the right (left) outer edge of a left-floating (or right-floating) element that occurs earlier in the document's source, unless the top of the later element is below the bottom of the former."
I wanted to tear my eyes out reading that....
Rating: - Thorough to the point of incomprehensibility
I've been working with and around computers since 1980. I have a broad technical background. I like technical books and get most of my information from them. I was prepared to like this book. So why don't I?
The short answer is unacceptably poor technical editing.
First and foremost this book suffers from the disease that afflicts virtually all O'Reilly Definitive Guides: An apparent phobia about providing cross-references to the page or pages contain cited information. It thus becomes your job to wade through the T.O.C. and/or index and find the information referred to.
Second, this book assumes that you're keenly interested (to cite but one example) to know what as-yet-unavailable CSS3 might someday do with regard to "Glyph versus content area." As for me, I found the book's abundance of this too-clever-by-half ("Look at how much *I* know!") esoteric detritus infuriating. Again, one can't blame the book's author for wanting to show off a bit, but one can fully blame the book's editor for allowing him to.
Then there's the book's laughably over-complicated section on Tables. Pages of windy bloviation about how XML doesn't understand tables but but precious little on how to use CSS -- the title of the book, remember? -- to get a table setup the way you might want it to be. Did an editor even look at this section?
In the end this book contains lots of excrutiatingly abstruse background minutiae about XML standards and the like that you might possibly enjoy reading about once you've independently acquired your own understanding of it. In the meantime don't think for a second you're going to be able to use this book to come up with a reasonably straighforward explanation of to how to use CSS to display some content the way you want to -- your time will instead be spent trying to swim your way out of yet another of the book's overly detailed technobabble digressions...
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