I was surprised at the depth. Hands on training books are perceived as starter books. However, in this book there are any less-than-obvious tidbits for front-end developers - even those that already use CSS all the time and may think themselves past such a book. I teach an adult ed class on css and always look for lessons I can share with my students. I recommend this book to them because it has modern concepts sprinkled with insights that even an experienced coder may not have thought of. The chapters each are build around a single concept, and they explore permutations of that concept in examples the student builds using a provided web page that is completely ready, minus the code they are studying in that chapter. The last chapter puts it all together and lets the student build the page they have been working on the whole book pretty much from scratch. The IE 'haslayout' problem another reviewer pointed out IS huge - it it the reason I give this 4 instead of 5 stars, but that is really my ONLY gripe with this book.

This is a great book for someone learning CSS or for someone who might have skipped a few basics when they learned CSS originally. Eric Meyer is pretty much the most famous author of CSS books. His books rarely miss.

The book is very high quality as far as being easy to read. It uses high quality paper and print. The examples are in full color and are very sharp. This book is definitely easy on the eye balls - major kudos to whoever handled this part of the process.

One odd thing is that the book smells really good! I buy lots of books and this is the only one that has an odor. I don't know what smell it is but it smells a little like fresh pears. Great for long flights because it doubles as an air freshener.

Unfortunately, like most css books, the examples often do not work for all browsers. Most of these good authors are in love with their Macs so much that they test only on an operating system and browser that less that 5% of people use. This book , like the lynda.com site it promotes, has the same problem - it is geared towards the few people who use a Mac.

The free 3 day trial to lynda.com was exciting until I signed up and saw it was 100% QuickTime(mac) format. I will never make the mistake of installing QuickTime again.

These books and tutorials being made on and for Macs and QuickTime are a PLAGUE right now. I am putting my wallet away for a while until these authors start releasing tutorials that cover more than Mac specific issues.

As a CS major, I had taken a web programming course that mostly dealt with Javascript and PHP but didn't heavily emphasize the design, and had been meaning to learn CSS sometime. As a beginner, I've looked at some online tutorials, but none presented the materials well. When I saw this at a bookstore, I was immediately drawn by the easy layout of the contents as well as the fully-colored screenshots of a current page as checkpoints (color helps a lot compared to other black-and-white texts, especially given the subject is CSS).

The author provides a fictional site (all codes and video tutorials included in the CD), from which he well explains the various aspects of CSS over 10 chapters, the last of which summarizes everything that you will have learned by the end. I especially liked how he had separated the unnecessary parts into an external stylesheet so that a reader can discard them and will know exactly what he has just modified actually does to a site. The author also breaks each chapter into smaller sections, with each latter continuing from previous ones (much like Skinner shaping his pigeons in small steps), so I was never overwhelmed or frustrated.

I rate this book a 4, however, because there are minor typos (mostly missing dashes or periods in selectors) in the book that may confuse some, and I feel the author should have proofread better when codes are crucial. They are easy to locate and fix and the provided codes in the CD are without mistakes, so you can always look at the next section in the CD to see what the correct code should be.

Like others have complained, the author only seems to have tested this on Firefox on a Mac, and I'm not sure how different the site is on IE7 (both externally and internally), but in all fairness, the author does mention how some aspects do not work on IE and how to get around them.

If you are a novice to CSS and want to teach yourself, I highly recommend this book.

There are a lot of books about CSS. There are a lot of books pretending to be a tutorial about CSS. In my opinion, this book is one the few recent books about CSS that is worth for a beginner in the field.

This book was a good start for learning CSS. It works solely with code instead of using Dreamweaver CS3 interface box in the design view. I was expecting to learn more about the interface box but the entire book uses code in a text editing program. Overall a decent book but I will definitely need other to supplement it.