Rating:  - Great only for resource
Most of the stuff that you learn in CSS can be found already ONLINE and before I bought this book, I had a very good fundamental understanding CSS and thought I buy this book for more knowledge and learn anything that I could have missed. Well I did, but I could have found this information online, however I've spent months learning CSS and it's very difficult to found all the things in this CSS book in one place.
I recommend this book if you have the stimulation to learn from a book and the money because of course the internet is FREE.
Rating:  - Not a Book on Website Design.
This book is a reference, and quite an excellent one at that. Definitely complete (as the title implies).
However, you won't really learn how to use CSS to design websites with it.
This book is for people who already have a pretty good handle on website design. I guess a good analogy would be that you can't learn English from the Oxford Dictionary, but the Oxford can certainly benefit you once you already know the language.
Rating: - Got me up and running
Before I got this book, I knew basic HTML, and I knew that CSS could help me put all my design information in one place - fonts, colors, etc. I knew it could be used for layout, somehow, but all the tutorials and articles I'd read online had just given me bits and pieces.
This book gives a systematic explanation of CSS and how it works. I have read through it once, and although I haven't grasped every detail it gives, I have learned enough to completely rework some of my pages with CSS, making them much better than they ever were before.
If you want to use CSS for layout, you need to read this book. The concepts of positioning and floating made no sense to me before I read this, and I couldn't understand why things ended up in seemingly random places on the page. The diagrams showing margins, width, padding, etc made the whole thing a lot more intelligible. And the explanations of how to group classes were awesome, too.
This is a great introduction, a systematic explanation, and a useful reference.
Rating:  - Disappointed
Having read Dan Flanagan's excellent definitive guide on javascript, I was looking forward to Eric Meyer's definitive guide on CSS. Also, I have been impressed with the O'Reilly's books on my shelf. I figured this was a "could not miss". However, after only a chapter into the book I found myself doing google searches to fill in gaps. The information on page layout is especially skimpy. I do not consider myself an expert in web page design, but I am willing to dig in and learn. Trouble is, I had to do it on google.
Rating: - Good reference
This book could be organized a little more intuitively, but all-in-all it has the stipulations and definitions you need from the CSS standards in a printed form. I would recommend the pocket guide as well.
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