Rating:  - Easy to Use and Indispensable
This is the best CSS book that I've used. The topics are laid out very clearly. I love that the book is succinct and I can delve right into the examples and apply them right away to my website. This book has really helped me to write more efficient code and to design more visually pleasing websites. It has great explanations about pros and cons of different methods of code implementation. I highly recommend this book to designers who are new to CSS. You should start with this book.
Rating: - A must have
The concepts that are taught in this book are essential for anyone working on the web. Dan will open your eyes about the way web documents should be structured so that it is accessible by 'all' audiences (people using different browsers and people with visual impairments) AND so they'll be easy to style and maintain.
Each chapter starts with a goal and then he presents different approaches to achieve that goal...weighing the pros/cons for each method.
Dan conveys the information in a clear, succinct and "matter of fact" style. I actually took this book with me on the subway one day and was so engrossed that I missed my stop! :)
Rating: - One of the better CSS books.
This book was an amazing resource for me. Since buying it, it's been in my messenger bag to ensure a quick reference at both work and at home.
This is a perfect book for a web-designer that has been toying with css for a while and is ready to make the jump to full-fleged web standards.
Like Zeldman's "Designing w/ Web Standards", this book reads more like a conversation than a tech book. It explains things easily and not in a condescending way.
I particularly liked the way this book gives you real-world explanations of taking what you are *used* to doing and showing you how to better do it with css. It's very clear and makes the transition much easier.
My only complaint from this book was that CSS Positioning was not covered very lightly. It would have been nice to have expanded on this area bit more.
I can't recommend this book enough.
Rating: - The Perfect Guide to Clean HTML
An excellent walk-through on how to separate the semantic content from the presentational view of web pages using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). It's one thing to know what CSS is but it's quite another to learn it's full potential. With this book you'll learn how to extract all of you presentational markup and even improve upon it through the use of powerful CSS techniques. If you still use B, I, or FONT tags, you need this book! Using the information in this book, coupled with a scripting language (Ruby, Perl, Python, PHP), and a database (MySQL, etc), you can create a powerful code generation utility for producing or updating entire websites with simple templates.
Rating: - Why use CSS? Read this book and find out
I read this book from cover to cover, and was sorry to see it come to an end. I don't say that about too many books, let alone computer manuals, but this is one is exceptional. Prior to reading Web Standards Solutions, I had never found a good rationale for using CSS. Oh sure, it's the new web standard, and everyone will say it's the right thing to do, just like eating your spinach. But no one had ever shown me what CSS is good for until Dan Cederholm came along.
Here's the reason, in four words: It makes things easy.
If you have been struggling with tables nested in tables nested in more tables, with pieces of images here and bits of images there, and font declarations everywhere, all so that you can make things line up nicely and make your pages look attractive, be aware that there is a way out of the wilderness. Dan Cederholm can show you how. In the process, he has created a fine example of the way a computer manual ought to be written.
The first section of the book deals with using CSS to mark up various elements of a page, including lists, headings, forms, anchors, and, yes, even tables. The second section broadens the scope to consider how CSS can be used to structure larger things, like an entire page. For example, there's a very good (and simple!) section on how to set up a page with a header, footer, and two columns. By adding a few lines of CSS, the two-column layout can be turned into three columns. And with no tables at all. Hallelujah.
Each section of the book starts with an explanation of what he would like to accomplish -- create a menu, for instance, or apply a font style to just one page on a site, or one element on a page. He then shows you several ways that you can use CSS to do this, and goes over the pros and cons of each. The code is always simple, even though the results are impressive, because CSS allows you to do these things easily. But to keep you from going astray, Mr. Cederholm first shows the basic code, then adds one feature at a time, and shows the result of that. All of this is presented so clearly that it's trivial to understand, yet highly effective when you see what he's accomplished.
As for caveats, there are only a couple. It should be emphasized that the book is an introduction to CSS; if you're looking for a comprehensive guide to every feature of the language, you won't find it here. The book will definitely whet your appetite, and make you want to learn more, but you'll need other manuals to take you further.
I was also going to say that CSS veterans probably won't find much that is new here, but on second thought I'm not entirely sure of that. There are a lot of nifty ideas in this book. Mr. Cederholm was the designer for the Fast Company web site, and he shows some of the problems he encountered when architecting that site, and the solutions he came up with. They are clever and simple, but not necessarily obvious.
If you're debating whether to buy the book, take a look at a sample chapter on the author's web site. I did, and was so impressed that I went ahead and bought the book. I suspect you will, too.
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