Rating:  - Beginner Web Designer
If you are just starting out and are looking for direction in web design, buy this book. Even if you already have your feet wet in Web design this book may help you out. Simon Collison did a great job writting on the topic of CSS stylesheets and web design. Its not a lecture book, its a hands on instruction manual that progressively gets you used to working with CSS. It shows you the do's and the donts and Simon is very motivated to keep your attention.
I went through this book a chapter at a time. I kept record of each chapter and worked through all the examples. I learned how to properly format my XHTML and CSS. Did i mention i don't have any real experience in web design. As a beginner it is very difficult to find a book that will give you examples and teach you how to do things. You usually either get a book thats nothing but a lecture on the topic with a miss leading title that says for beginners, or you get a 800 page manual thats more or less like a dictionary, last you may get a quick project that leaves you with no knowledge of the subject but you sure can make a great steriotipical format of a web page.
The book clearly avoids the common door stopper and quick start book. Its not to lengthy and it does a great job implimenting theory behind the code. Simon shows you formats to properly use when developing CSS style sheets, so that your pages look clean and are easily accessible when it comes to trouble shooting or making changes.
Simon Collison also keeps a light base of humor throughout to keep you interested but it isn't overdone to where it just gets in the way of your reading. The book is finished with a Case Study where Simon has you make a page using all the techniques you have learned previously throughout the book. My only con is that there are a few things at the end in the case study that Simon has you do that arn't previosly covered. You may not even notice. (But if you are making a page alligned in the center don't forget to have your containing div's left and right margin be set to auto.)
But, you have to consider the length of the book and the fact that its intended for beginners, you can't include everything or you start to get to lengthy, which i wouldn't have necesarily minded. I'm sure they probably left some stuff out also because, ...they want you to buy the next book in line.
So in conclusion I recomend this book. Even if you don't want to learn the art of CSS and are a dairy cow farmer that dosn't speek english, i still recomend this book!
Rating:  - Could have been better!
This book is incomplete! Subjects to quickly covered and many errors between printed copy and downloaded lessons.
Chapter 16 was hurried and confusing and again incomplete.
After saying this I did learn the gist of CSS so not a total loss!
Author knew his stuff - he just seemed to hurry through this book and did not do the job I felt he knew how to do.
Rating: - great for beginners
Beginning CSS Web Development is a great resource for beginners. As long as you already have some HTML knowledge you will easily pick up on CSS concepts. This book is well written, full of examples and outside resources that will keep you busy for days. Before I got this book CSS had always seemed this mysterious complicated code that would take years to learn and I really didn't want to be bothered. This book proved the opposite, CSS is simple and can make your design much more flexible and elegant, your HTML code will look cleaner and organized. It is a lot easier to work with style sheets than HTML alone. I am confident that this book has covered all the basics of CSS. Definitely a book to have at hand.
Rating:  - Well organized and written
As a person who recently decided to learn how to properly use CSS I was drawn to the title. The book delivers everything I needed to to. Good introductions and explainations with illustrations that are helpful. I can't rate how it is from the professional view point but it has helped me add style sheets to my web sites and improved my overall designs.
Rating: - Beginning CSS Web Development
There are probably other books out there that "teach" you CSS well, but I hadn't found them. I have tried to grapple with this subject for years investing quite a bit of money on various publications and web programs, none of which hit the mark. Some told me what to do without explaining why, while others were lacking in communication to the point that I never finished reading them, having given up in total frustration. This was going to be my final attempt to come to terms with web design using CSS. I have to say that Simon Collison's approach and clear explanation made the task very enjoyable and most importantly "understandable". For the first time I was able to design a website in CSS(with no validation errors) based on a site I had previously constructed with table design. This to me was the true test. Understandably there are things that could have been developed further in the publication, but this is a huge topic and a book such as this cannot tackle too much without becoming overwhelming. I am also able to refer to the other books I bought on CSS and understand stuff that I previously had trouble with. My sincere thanks to the author. I hope the royalties from the book pay for a comfortable retirement.
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