Over the years, CSS has helped change the way information is displayed on the web. Since its inception, CSS has evolved into a full-featured language capable of formatting not only text but almost all elements of a web site such as tables, lists, and more. CSS is not the easiest language to learn, but a book such as this helps.

Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content from Presentation by Owen Briggs, Steven Champeon, Eric Costello, Matt Patterson, is a great way to not only be introduced to CSS but also to learn the details that will ultimately help you to design or convert existing sites using the CSS language. The book introduces you to simple CSS formatting involving text and other web elements such as lists, tables, and more. After relishing some of the simple formatting concepts, the book guides you through the more complicated process of creating layouts using CSS.

Beyond direct applications of CSS, the authors explain some subtle issues that you will encounter while using CSS. While CSS is standardized by the W3C organization, the implementation of CSS varies across various browsers. The authors do an excellent job of covering some of the inconsistencies and how to resolve them. You are provided specific examples of code, and you are also given code that would help older browsers into displaying CSS-based layouts.

The book also takes interesting breaks from explaining CSS concepts and provides insights into unique features about CSS that are cool to know! One such section, explains how to make your pages downgrade gracefully and display properly in text-only browsers.

The various authors present the information very clearly, and you, towards the end of the book, will have learned how to not only use but also implement CSS in your design solutions. To aid you in your quest of applying what you have learned, the authors provide sample projects and brief guidelines before sending you off on a full filled CSS coding journey.

This is a great book for beginners and advanced users of CSS to learn and reference from.

This book is perfectly fine if you can't be bothered to seek out most of this information online. The authors' own websites are actually some of the best places to start. But the book is useful, even down to the entire chapter devoted to analyzing Netscape 4's CSS abilities--something most others will simply not cover.

However, the price of this book is about two times too high. It's short, with no CD, but it runs as much as many of the "phone-book" tech books. This is a fifteen-dollar value, no more.

This book's first chapter is about the only one that is clear. The rest of the chapters are unfortunately not well presented and structured. The examples and the CSS examples are laid out in very confusing ways. It is very often difficult to tell which snippet of code matches which screenshot. In that respect, chapter 7 is a nightmare.
Also cruelly missing from the book are a list of all possibly attributes for each property.
You will not be able to learn CSS entirely from this book. You will have to either buy another more comprehensive book, or to use Web tutorials.

This book is very well written. It is the first technical book that I have read cover-to-cover in years.

Overall, this is an outstanding text for learning CSS and how to appropriately use it with HTML and XHTML. It is perfect for someone who is already comfortable with basic HTML markup and would like to leverage the various advantages of CSS. The book's only weak point is its coverage of the CSS box model. Arguably one of the more difficult parts of learning CSS, the chapter on the box model makes only passing reference to the float property, which is used very frequently in CSS layouts. Other examples in the box chapter were overly simplified and did not give much more info than I've found online.

The chapters on the basic syntax of CSS are very good and the typography coverage is outstanding.