ritten by the authors of CSS, at first I found it a bit heavy in dialogue and backgrounds. Not until you open the book to the index does one actually realize the wealth of information in the book. Do not expect this book to show examples of the next great page, but as a resource in trouble shooting it helped explain alot of questions I either was too lazy to look up in Dreamweaver Help or couldnt find the right type of answer elsewhere. My level is pretty much entry intermediate, but with this book, it took me a bit higher. I am getting rid of my introductory CSS books and using this one as my main go to guide.

CSS is covered in detail (20 pages on CSS colour alone) and the explainations are straight forward. The most valuable chapter is "Spaces around boxes". Running over 30 pages, this is a well thumbed section that explained to me where I was going wrong with a layout CSS I was doggedly trying to force to do what I wanted. Once I went through this section, it became clear my folly.

This book now has an honour of being well coffee stained and front and center on my resource shelf.

I have gotten each edition of this book as it came out -- giving the still valuable previous edition to the most worthy co-worker. This book (whatever edition!) is rightly regarded as one that belongs by the desk of the astute and experienced Web worker.

When the first edition came out, I rejected it for another book on CSS. I figured that a book explaining CSS by the W3C alpha geeks who *created* the CSS recommendation would be too technical and unreadable. I learned how wrong I was. Lie and Bos's classic book turns out to be one of the most readable and clear treatments of CSS you can obtain.

I can agree that if you have a previous edition, there probably is no compelling reason to update. Some explanations have been elaborated and browser compatibility is updated for Firefox. The core value remains the same: simple enough for novices, detailed enough for experts.

Given the relation of the authors to the official work of the W3C, the book speaks with an authority as no other.

When a developer is in the middle of a project, what is needed is a guidebook that is short, well-written and organized logically. The book must also contain plenty of examples that are specific to the current chapter section, leaving out other confusing cross-references.

Cascading Style Sheets by Lie and Bos does all of the above. The book can be read cover-to-cover, or used as a reference as needed. I rarely had to use the index to find a subject, because the chapters are well-named and stick to their subject. This is rare.

The authors have exceptional credentials, authoring technical and exacting specifications for CSS. Yet they wrote a book that is clear and understandable for us mere mortals. Every web developer should have a copy.

This is a great CSS guide and reference. It has something for all skill levels.

Beforehand I thought the book would only be a technical (code-centered) guide to CSS, but it turned out to contain many practical design tips as well. I would say it is useful for both beginners and advanced website designers. If you're new to CSS, this book gives a great introduction to the subject, and if you've been in the game for a while you'll most likely find there were several handy, nifty little features of CSS 2.1 you didn't know about. (I thought I knew basically what there was to know about CSS, but the book has already tought me several new and useful things.)

The book is logically laid out and divided into chapters. One very useful feature is the complete list of CSS 2.1 properties found on the inside cover, as well as the browser compatibility information listed for each property. (Although I've found the latter to be slightly misleading at times. Specifically, the book claims that Firefox understands the 'quotes' property properly, while it quite obviously doesn't.)

If you already have the 2nd edition of this book, don't bother purchasing the 3rd, as little of the content has changed.

Only very light edits have been made to the text. The coding examples remain the same - after six years. The order of the chapters has been slightly rearranged, and two outdated chapters (on WebFonts and aural style sheets) have been dropped. Color illustrations are used less frequently, hurting the clarity of the examples; and the page layout is not as clean. On the positive side, entries in the "CSS quick reference" (on the inside cover) now refer to the correct page numbers in the book. And of course the browser compatability charts, noting which browsers support which CSS features, have been updated: Internet Explorer 6, Firefox 1, Opera 7.2, Safari 1, and the Prince 4 CSS formatter are now covered.

If you have not used previous editions of this book, read through the comments made about the 2nd edition, as much of what was said there still applies here. This remains a decent CSS coding reference, but frankly, I refer to Elizabeth Castro's "HTML for the World Wide Web, 5th edition" far more frequently.