Rating:  - Good reference guide.
Quick Review:
Doesn't blab about how webstandards are so important.. yada yada yada...
Just gives examples of how to write better XHTML/CSS code in an easy to read format.
A good addition to the arsenal for any web developer.
Rating: - Much needed book with superb approach
For just under a year now I have been dipping into the online community of advocates for the many uses of CSS. As someone who is a graphic designer and part time web designer it can sometimes be a pain to find that mix of visual, structural, and functional design needed to take your portfolio and skills to the next level.
This book takes a very clear approach to laying out many paths to a single, or similiar, solutions. I think a big problem with all of us "non gurus" who are trying to get into CSS is knowing whether a tag or style is compatible with the "popular browsers" and if we are going to hand off the project to our clients full of holes and subsequently full of complaints. You can trust Dan as a professional who lays down a number of approaches that can be used, none of which are totally obselete and are going to leave you with an unhappy client.
Another great element of this book is the value it adds to your work. When you put these skills to work on your sites, your not only creating visually great work, but your also making your work compatible on all levels (hand helds, multiple browsers, screen readers, non CSS compatible browsers)and the book even shows why using specific techniques will optimize your code for search engines (and anyone worth thier weight in gold knows how important search engine optimization is for clients).
There are alot of great reasons to fork over your money on this book. As I believe I heard someone mention before, if you have basic CSS knowledge and this book you will be ready to rock. Just dont pick it up expecting to learn CSS from the ground up. For those who have that basic working knowledge, this is the next step in your CSS revolution!
Rating: - Excellent quick read to get you up to speed
This book is not a reference, nor a comprehensive tutorial on XHTML / CSS. It shows through examples the advantages of these techniques without getting on a soapbox and preaching for pages on end. Ideally, you would have this book, and a comprehensive tutorial/reference book.
Rating: - Worth the price!
I am very pleased with this book. For a while now I've been learning CSS by looking at the code of webpages I liked, and I picked up a lot of bad habits. This book helped me understand how useful coding to the standards can be. I have gone back and completely redesigned my site with the help of this book; now, in the future, I am confident that site-wide changes will be easy and painless.
The converstational tone of the book was a welcome change from the more technical tone of other books on programming subjects. One of my favorite little moments was under the subheading "A cite for curious eyes" (about the cite tag) and he writes: "Getting tired of the corny headings yet? Oh, good. Neither am I." That's a good example of the light tone that helps make the more technical information easy to digest.
I really enjoyed reading this book, and I know my webpages now and in the future will benefit greatly from the knowledge I got from reading it. I highly recommend it to those who know a bit about CSS, but want to know more. Keep Google handy any time you want to find out more about a certain tag or something that he assumes you know if you aren't sure about it; there were just a few I had trouble with, but a quick search on google cleared it up for me quickly.
Rating:  - Booster for those who've passed their XHTML & CSS exams
First off, this book is definitely not a reference book, if you want to code up in XHTML and CSS, then you need to do the groundwork which is covered in other books. What this book does do, is show you how to practically apply these technologies in everyday situations of web design, and show patterns of commonly accepted, useful tricks and techniques.
Invaluable to the freshly converted - yes - but make sure you know your stuff or this book will leave you floating nowhere. There are no explanations, or details on XHTML or CSS, you must have a reasonably good grasp of both.
The book assumes we are here to learn the simple applications without being confusing. Thats cool, but the book also assumes you have a good working knowledge of CSS, so its simple, but not so simple. I was disappointed that there was not much depth to the examples shown, and some of the potential pitfalls were not indicated. For example, on the chapter on CSS positioning, were given a float method, but its not explained why this is not ideal or where to find more information about the related issues. That stuff would seem relevant to the readers of this book.
Anyway, i enjoyed it, it was really useful - all the applications are excellent, but be careful as you will probably get stuck without a grounding in XHTML and CSS.
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