Rating:  - Excellent Guides
First off, if we widen our horizons and try a few different browsers, CSS becomes far more useful -- and for any web programmer it should be like finally getting to the fun part. CSS takes a bit of learning. Experiment with it, play with it, discover the power of it. It will free you from so many pains in the you-know-what, you'll want to have a kegger to celebrate your new found control and freedom.
This guide is not a CSS "cookbook." It is indeed very much like a dictionary and it is exceedingly useful. It is a reference text and it can be used as a learning tool. Figure out how it is organized, mark it up, use index tabs to quickly find the sections you need once you have found them the first time. Whatever it takes to make the information more accessible to you.
There are other books that will illuminate the creative aspects of CSS. Buy them, too, if you like, but this one is the foundation. And Eric Meyer is a sure fire expert with this stuff, if anyone is.
And finally, once you get CSS under your belt, so to speak, you can be creative yourself. Playing with CSS can't hurt you. It won't even get your hands dirty. So, explore, create, do amazingly cool things -- and take this book with you!
Rating:  - Whatever happened to O'Reilly?
I love O'Reilly books but "definitively" not this one!!! What a dissapointment! The author should first learn HOW TO WRITE A BOOK AND THEN, NOT TALK TO HIMSELF OR ABOUT HIMSELF AND HOW POWERFUL CSS IS ON EVERY F'ING PAGE!
Did the O'Reilly editors take a vacation?
Rating:  - Nice try, but not a well-written book
This book's problem... the publishing house didn't assign an industry expert as content editor but published it 'as received from author' (though maybe they DID spellcheck it). I say that based on the fact that over the past 35 years, I've earned a tidy little sideline sum as a content editor for various publishing houses. (I am also an sgml expert and have built about 6000 webpages in the past decade, most by hand, some using Cold Fusion, so I am also an HTML/CSS/JavaScript/XML, etc. 'expert'.)
This book has too much author me me me me-ing (kinda like my review, heh heh) and not enough clear, concise explanations as to how CSS works and what problems might be encountered in which browsers if you use css to replace tables for page layout.
I recommend a css beginner go to w3schools site. They have a beginner's css course that is quite good, for the basics. Plus they allow you to try out the css in a browser. It's not a full-on course, but it IS a good beginning and it's free. You should know HTML before you take the css course. Also, you can go to lissaexplains for tidbits of css info such as how 'div' works, etc. Then just start building a site for the practice. If you can't think of a website idea (if you are a beginner, that can be a difficult thing... the design of a website), and you have access to 2002 or newer Microsoft applications, just use one of the office programs (Word or Publisher) to generate a couple of basic webpages, then view the template in a browser, and printout the pages. Don't look at the 'view source' of the generated Microsoft webpage as all that baloney microsoft code will freak you out. Then try to duplicate the webpage layout by writing your own html/css code... after you have learned css at w3schools, etc. You will discover you'll need at least TWO stylesheets for your webpages as css works differently in various browser. Don't worry about it, w3schools will explain the basics. Generally speaking, you'll need one stylesheet for Firefox/Mozilla, the other for MSIE and Opera. But don't waste your money on this book. It's not a beginner's book though it purports to be, and the author, well, he really needs to teach a couple of nightschool courses on css, using his book as the courseware. The questions that the night school (aka 'highly motivated') students will ask over and over and over will quickly enlighten him as to what's wrong with his book and give him a little needed humility. (Teaching nightschool CompSci sure worked for me, heh heh.)
HOWEVER, if you want a book then I recommend anything by Danny Goodman. He's a good 'explainer'. His book (ISBN: 0-596-00316-1) Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference, 2nd Edition is a good book to have by your side as you are learning web building.
Rating: - Disappointing, poorly organized
I'm sorry to say that after getting halfway through this book, I got disgusted with it and am now shopping for another. What bothered me is that the author manages to make CSS look horribly complicated, when the fact is, the authors of CSS never intended it to be so. A book of this sort should start by trying to show how to use CSS in a practical, simple way, to gain the reader's trust that this technology is not off the deep end. Instead, Eric seems to spend most of his effort and time explaining "what can go wrong", which demonstrates his own knowledge of CSS but does little to transfer that knowledge to us.
Rating: - Not very practical...reads like a dictionary
I just spent the day reading this book and it's about 10 hours I wish I had back. The book may indeed be a good reference, but it isn't much of a teaching model. With the vast majority of the world using IE, all too often you'll spend time reading a section and trying to understand it only to find at the end of the section a blurb "This feature is not supported in any version of IE". The first time it was aggravating, by the fourth or fifth time I began to wonder why the book wasn't structured so that readers could be made aware in advance of theoretical features not yet supported. For the most part I'd have skipped past and saved time.
There are simply not enough examples in the book and many of the ones that exist are confusing. I can't quite explain it, I just found the book aggravating. I'm sure I'll use it as a reference, but my impression of it is the author created a reference first, and then wrote a book around it.
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