When searching for a technical manual, I usually am able to narrow the field down to just 2 or 3 that together will cover my needs.

I sat down with a stack of about 15 books on CSS, including the most popular listed on Amazon, and started thumbing through them to evaluate their content, organization, reference material, indexing, etc. I eliminated several books, and had a tall stack of possible books to one side when I opened this book. I was first struck by the simple beauty of the book layout. The material in this book is presented in an exceptionally pleasing manner, easy to read, and well punctuated with examples and graphics. Code is colorcoded so the reader can easily pick out the portions being described in the text, and followed by color photos of the actual screens resulting from the code.

The book is logically organized and includes the best and most comprehensive reference section of all the books I considered.

The topics are easy to read and clearly presented. There are exercises to do which allow the reader to actually test-drive the techniques described and accompanying code files are available on the website to go along with the book.

I was surprised to find one book that contained everything that I look for in a technical manual. Hurray! I didn't have to buy 2 or 3 books to cover all the bases.

Thank you Richard York.

this is a good book for the beginner who likes a lot of repetition and hand holding. there is A LOT of overviews, introductions, transitions, summations, and examples to reinforce the concepts being taught. as you might guess, there is A LOT of overlap when the writer and/or editor chooses this type of writing style.

i did learn a lot from reading it, and i did retain the information. however, i might bravely suggest that i could have done this anyway, even if the book contained prodigiously less reiteration.

i would have unreservedly given the book at least 4 stars if it had been more condensed. but that's how bad the repetition was in this book. it got pretty exhausting at times, for the reader.

for a future edition, i would recommend to the writer and/or editor to cut out all of the needless verbosity.

This book is what it's intend to be: an excellent book for CSS beginners. Good sequence of chapters, good examples, and the wellcome surprise of color sintax and screen pictures.
Congratulations to Wrox, and I expect that other books could be printed with same quality presentation.

I've read several books about CSS over the last three or four years, but this book has to be the most complete I've seen. Not only does Mr. York obviously know this material quite extensively, he does it in a way that makes total sense. And this book is not just for beginning web developers either, there's quite a bit of information that more experienced developers can learn about. I also liked the various code examples in color. It helps to make the specific code stand out much more when it's in a different color than the code around it. This of course helps the reader to understand and remember it more effectively.

The author also takes time to talk about the differences in browsers and how each one presents the code. There are few things more aggravating to a web developer than having to deal with the various quirks of each browser. What looks great in IE may not look so hot in Firefox or Safari. And vice versa. The author cites various examples of this throughout the book, as well as "workarounds" for each "issue."

Another thing that makes this book so enjoyable is how the author goes through step by step instructions on how to achieve a particular style. This is one way to show how styles affect presentation.

It's amazing how powerful CSS has become over the last few years. There's a lot you can do with styles and Mr York has shown all web developers ways we can take advantage of this power.