Some useful tips on creating good semantic markup. However, the author tends to build his case for this markup by citing tables on a lot of examples and the arguments to switch to a DIV structure. In some ways, I found this amusing as most of us know the benefits of table-less designs. The book reads more like a story telling similar to many technical analysis stock chart books I read based on past hindsight that no longer is relevant.

I bought this primarily to read about the indestructible box example. But I have to say after reading this that the markup is too narrow in scope. Not every box is going to have a DIV followed by an heading tag to create the rounded corners. Not only that but it was a fixed width example too so how can this be "bullet proof". Rather, the author should have come up with a generic solution so that the box can be sized width wise and lengthwise. Many people use a CMS and the markup to create a box is different.

All in all though its a good book to follow along to see how one goes about doing actual design in CSS. There's very few books out there like this that teach design while taking a hands on approach.

Most of the solutions are very good but the "problems" behind quite a few of these are non-existing or not important at the most.
The rest of the subjects are OK and if you are prepared to skip about 1/3 of the book I can recommend it.

I have been a so-called "table monkey" and have been longing to become a human being. So I picked up this book.

Throughout the text, the emphasis is placed in creating an XHTML/CSS page that does not break, when the user environment and/or the browser setting are not what the site designer expect or anticipated. At first I was a little skeptical of the author's rather strict adherence to the design that does not break in situations such as, say, a user uses a very large font setting for better readability; such a consideration may be of little importance nowadays, since even Firefox 3 now "zooms" in and out the entire page contents by default, not just text fonts. Furthermore, for many web developers under pressure to produce web sites that just work "well enough" for most reasonable cases, it does seem like the practices that are recommended in this book seem to take a little more care and time than desired.

However, all the design ideas presented in this book are very well thought out, and it actually does not take much extra effort to implement, once a designer gets used to them. I am in the process of updating my web design skills from what I knew as a table monkey, and I assure that this book offers plenty of enlightenment to those in similar situations as I am. Good thing is that once I learned the techniques presented in the book, I can come up with other effective ways to use CSS to fine tune layouts. Using HTML tables still offer some advantage if you need to support older nonstandard-compliant (Microsoft) browsers, but the flexibility of CSS just cannot be beaten if the site designs require extreme attention to detail.

The only drawback is that the presentation of the XHTML/CSS codes is slightly too meticulous and verbose for someone who is already very proficient in reading them. It is also not a cheap book for the amount of contents. Highly recommended, especially considering that the good CSS support in most modern browsers has started allow us to transform ourselves from table supermonkeys to CSS subhuman.

This is easily the best CSS book I have ever owned. It's very easy to read and provides excellent, and sadly few, examples. Most importantly, the author does a wonderful job helping the reader understand concepts and how and why certain things are implemented.

Other books are FULL of examples... although they usually lack the details that someone like me need. The details, writing, and illustrations make this book much more attractive. Sure, Bulletproof Web Design isn't the end-all of books of this nature. It's short. You'll need more books. But any serious developer needs to read this book.

If you like "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug, then you'll adore this one as well.

I purchased this book in the hopes it would have fixed my floating issues. It did, to a point. A couple of the examples didn't work well with Firefox. I found this book was helpful to fix a few things, but I did find that I was able to find other fixes online. I still enjoy this book, I just wish it worked better with Firefox browsers.

This book is very readable, and the examples are presented in building block style, step by step. Practical benefits of XHTML and CSS are provided, and the code needed for the samples to work in the major browsers. I highly recommend the book!

After building enough sites from scratch, and wanting to make darn sure they were browser friendly and accessible, I got this book due to it addressing cross-browser problems and techniques for accessibility.

Now the practical knowledge in this book is great. It's the no-hold-bars dirty hacking of CSS/XHTML to force it to work in browsers, and address how to get sites to be more accessible (like addressing text sizing that scales accordingly in IE 7 and FF, and to look similar in each browser). Added benefit it even shows you how to tweak the Blogger Tic-Tac template, to be even better -- for beginning bloggers, this is very sweet.

But, I learned that this book is geared to the 10% of the web browser market (Firefox), which meant code examples to experiment with weren't friendly to IE 7. Worse, the code explanations were quite elementary -- dictation/narrative style -- which didn't give me enough info to know WHAT I was doing. Efforts to tweak examples (like in Chapter 4) required over an hour trying to get the floats to not break, if I resized them -- all because the explanations were so scant to know what variables to tweak.

Really wanted to like this book, as it's tailored for two main headaches in web design (cross-browser friendliness; accessibility tweaking) that's not often covered in other CSS/(X)HTML books. Alas, the search is on for a CSS/XHTML book that is truly cross-browser friendly. :/

I am very skeptical about the value of IT related books. Having been in the industry for 17 years I have read very few that deliver what I am looking for and instead have tended to rely upon articles from disparate sources across the web.

There are of course exceptions - and this book is a shining example of how to make a subject understandable for many levels of experience AND be of value to all.

If you are interested in making your site CSS friendly, want to unravel what all the various things mean, or have a working knowledge of CSS and want to go beyond what most average developers know about CSS then I would strongly recommend buying this book. It won't solve world hunger, but it will solve many of your CSS questions and designs.

The second edition of Bulletproof Web Design is as good as the first, but keeps it current with IE7 and the ever-changing techniques CSS professionals use. The book is written in a voice anyone can understand, and is filled with techniques pros use. The lessons don't go that deep, but there is little here that anyone who writes CSS for a living will disagree with. I was surprised that he still talked about adding hacks to your CSS to feed special values to different versions of IE, but in the last chapter 'Putting It All Together' he used external hack sheets for different versions of IE brought in with IE conditional comments, so all was forgiven. I would recommend this book to anyone who desires to improve the way that they write CSS.

This book is great. Sets you up with examples of web sites that real world major companies have created, and will walk you through a better way to do specific parts of the site.

A good tech book is one I can take with me on the train, read it, gain something, and then try out the technique once I get to the office. In other words, it lets me perform experiments in my mind and then try them for real later. Too many tech books fail to logically walk me through a process and instead either (a) rely too heavily on complex examples that must be done on a computer or (b) regurgitate existing documentation.

_Bulletproof Web Design_ avoids both traps, instead making a case for accessible design and then explaining - in easy-to-understand chunks - how to do it.

To put it another way, very few books in this genre succeed in changing the way I approach something. This one does.

Bulletproof Web Design: Improving flexibility and protecting against worst-case scenarios with XHTML and CSS

This is one of the best CSS books I have read. Author demonstrated how to make the sites bulletproof on desirable features like adjustable text, scalable navigation, expandable rows, and sizable boxes. Unlike other CSS books, author demonstrated standards-based strategies for building designs that provide flexibility, readability, and user control with useful code examples, ample illustrations, and clear explanations. This book changes the way on how we treat CSS and HTML from the old traditional concept to the cutting-edge practice in any modern browsers, yet making successful sites degrade gracefully in any browsers. This is a good reference book I would keep using and reading repeatedly. This is excellent classroom book for CSS beginners to build strong foundation or advance professionals to push their skills to the next level.

Bulletproof Web Design: Improving flexibility and protecting against worst-case scenarios with XHTML and CSS (2nd Edition) (Voices That Matter)

The book is very well written for me. I know enough CSS and XHTML, but I get lost in the WHY to do certain things in certain places. The book has some great example websites built with tables, and then how the same site could be improved with XHTML and CSS. It is not a simple replace A with B. He takes you through each step, why he is doing it, and what the effect is in the browser.

I enjoyed it so much I read it all in a single day. And for the past 2 weeks have been going through and implementing his tactics on a new site I am building. It is very practicle advice to put into your sites today. It has definately helped my understanding of CSS in general, and even provides some good site design tips as well.

I highly recommend the book.

I found this to provide an excellent foundation for developing web pages using lean HTML and elegant CSS. It was not overly focused on Web Design or Web Development, but comfortably in the middle. The examples were progressive, practical, and timeless. In addition, the final chapter brought it all together nicely to make a full web page from scratch.

This book really is 5 stars! I gave it 4 stars only because I wanted more examples and, as a developer, I would have preferred more code.

Nonetheless, an excellent guide into the next generation of web development. Something I will reference again and wish I had read years ago!

If you're a frontend engineer who's already skilled in web standards (semantic markup, CSS presentation, unobtrusive javascript), this book may help you to the next level. If you're new to that stuff, then I recommend Head First HTML With CSS and XHTML.

This book is simply essential for the serious web developer who cares about standards and web sites that just work. It is well presented and thorough. The knowledge it imparts is readily extended to new design challenges. Well done!

I hope knocking down to 4 stars doesnt hinder people from buying this book, it is fantastic and should be in every web designer's library. Its concise, filled with well-explained and well-illustrated CSS strategies. The author's writing is one of the best I've ever seen in a technical book. Fun to follow and a great sense of humor, but very clear about what he's teaching.

I knock it down a star for two reasons, one it does focus a bit too much on people with screen readers. I know this sounds awful to say, but before I get crucified let me explain: as a designer my medium is mainly visual. While I do think it is important to keep your audience in mind for general public sites, I think for a design book the visual should be a bigger focus only because as designers we are trying to "wow" clients visually.

The other knock is that it is fairly small for a list price of $39.99 but price is an issue I have with most computer books. I would've maybe also like to see a chapter or two of random Tips & Tricks. Stuff like making text look weather-beaten by putting a GIF of "splotches" over it that I recently saw online. Maybe that's too gimmicky for this book, but you get the idea.

Despite the knocks this is a must-have CSS book and should be a definite purchase for all web designers out there. One of those you will come back to over and over.

Book content is excellent, but be prepared for disappointment with the paperback cover. It is not glossy and unlikely to hold up to regular handling. Plan on covering it with something reinforcing. In fact, the cover on my book also started curling within hours of unpacking it, before I even did more than flip through it.

New Riders is not the only publisher who seems unable to put a good cover on a paperback, but it mystifies me as to why that is, since so many publishers have no trouble with that aspect of book design.

I don't use to thoroughly read professional books from start to end. I rather browse them for solutions to specific problems I encounter.

Well, in this case I've broken my habits, because from the very moment that "Bulletproof Web Design" reached my hands, I made it my bedside (or better, my "bus-seat") book and I'm about to finish it already.

Dan Cederholm just covers 8 (+1) aspects of designing with web standards, but he does it so well and so easy to read and understand, that you learn much more about the foundations of CSS than what the chapters announce.

Congratulations, Dan. And thanks a lot.

I like the style that the book was written in and the building approach to a final piece of code. Too often books will take fragment pieces of code to describe several different functions and then lets the reader tie all of the pieces together. Okay for someone who is knowledgable but a nightmere for a person new to web design. This book assumes that you have prior knowledge of XHTML and web design. Being new to this language I did not understand many of the issues described in the book. One point that did come out loud and clear is that the industry desparately needs a set of standards that everyone adheres to.

It appeared that the main issue the book was trying to resolve was that of the visually impaired. While this is important the focus should be on general web design. Also, while the examples started off great and very well presented too many off shoots were addressed like shading of blocks, rounded corners for boxes, etc. These items make for great looking web designs but they should be discussed in a separate book as this took away from the main topic that was being addressed.

This is my first attempt at writing code for a web design and I must admit I find CSS difficult to learn. Bullet Proof Web Designs helped clear some things up but there still are many lines of code that don't work the way I thought they would so I continue to search for additional resources that presents a clearer path to good CSS web design. However, that's probably why I'm called a beginner.

This book is exactly what I was looking for. Instead of giving you fish, it well... it gives you some, but it teaches you to fish as well. This book, unlike other HTML/CSS books I looked at, gives you *direction*, helps to understand why certain things are better be done a certain way.

Using software programming as analogy, this book does not teach you C programming, like loops, variables and pointers, but rather shows you examples of elegant software designs, with bits of C langauge here and there.

It is very short and easy (very easy) to read, but somehow it finally twisted my mind, and "HTML generation" process is more fluent and natural (and less annoying) now.

Someone was complaining that he couldn't find the code for this book elsewhere. I happen to find the code for this book based on the filename of the zip file that was mentioned here. Grab it before it is gone!!!

[...]

This is definitely one of the most useful books I've found on CSS and XHTML. I liked the author's mantra of keeping the content separate from the design and going for maximum flexiblity. Great examples and very easy to follow steps. Each chapter concentrates on a specific aspect of web page design, with the last chapter sort of tying it all together. I only wish the book was longer - maybe Cederholm will write a Vol 2 with more. One aside - after reading this (and others) and noting all the various issues with the Internet Explorer browser (i.e. how much stuff it gets wrong), it makes you wonder if any of the folks at Microsoft would even admit in public to having worked on the IE 5 or 6 projects...

This is a must read. There are so many great ideas for building scalable pages. It's also written in a style that ANYONE can relate to even for people who are relatively new to XHTML/CSS. This book makes a great companion to "Stylin' with CSS" by Charles Wyke-Smith. It fun too.

One of very few technical books I could not put down. I devoured it from cover to cover. Packed with practical, extremely useful information.

I like the style of this book. It's got a nice graphic look, and the writing is easy to understand and has a friendly tone. The examples are laid out very well - new code is highlighted with red text, which is very helpful. I really like the approach of gradually adding more elements to CSS, explaining each as you go. And finally, I like the overall structure, which is to explain the "standard" way of doing something, then explain why that's not the best approach, and then to present the "bulletproof" way of doing the same thing.

However, I'm not sure I buy the author's suggestion that it's imperative to move from old-style HTML markup to a CSS-oriented approach. His main argument is that there is usually less code, and it's easier to read a page using a cell phone, or some other non-browser device. Also, he feels that users should be able to change text size in their browser, and the page should smoothly adjust to that.

This is all true, of course. Smaller code is easier to read (which is helpful only to the developer), and it does download quicker (although most of the bandwidth consumed is usually graphics and the like, not HTML). Certainly it's a good idea to structure a page so a blind person can read it using a special device. And finally, it's a nice thing to be able to adjust the size of the text on a page.

On the other hand, there are still many problems with using CSS so it works across all browsers. The book describes many workarounds, but to me, the fact that you need these workarounds really raises the question of whether it's "better" to switch to this new style. It's a question each developer will have to think about.

Bulletproof Web Design tackles some of the common design problems on modern websites. Each chapter takes the approach of defining a problem, usually in the context of what was wrong with the old table-based, inaccessible approach, and showing how to implement it using CSS and XHTML. The book is very readable. The examples are concise and clear and with plenty of pictures.

Topics covered:
- techniques for defining boxes with rounded corners, that can be made expandable
- planing for accessibility by organizing the page logically and allowing the text to be resized without making the page look bad
- using floats to achieve grid-like appearance (instead of tables)
- handling vertical expansion
- fluid layouts

I also recommend these books on CSS:
Accessible XHTML and CSS Web Sites Problem Design Solution and CSS: The Missing Manual

This book has a lot of good reccommendations for modern use of stylesheets. I really enjoyed the author's style, presenting the A B C apporach of solving a problem and explaining the strengths & weaknesses of each approach. There needs to be more books like this one on the subject. This is a very good buy for anybody into web design or css design.

Having previously completed reading Simon Collison's excellent "Beginning CSS", it was refreshing to jump into a book that I could get through fairly quickly (no offense, Simon).

The most valuable thing I learned from this book: It showed me how easy it is to throw a CSS "hook" (Unique identifier in the HTML that tells the browser where to apply the rules defined in your style sheet) onto pretty much anything in my HTML/XHTML, so it really freed up my thinking with regards to the flexibility of CSS.

Anyone with at least a beginners knowledge of Photoshop, Fireworks or similar program will not have a problem making their own graphics for each exercise. For those who either don't wish to or cannot create their own graphics, there was a zip file containing all the code and images on the author's personal site but at the time of this writing I cannot seem to find it. [At the time of this review the book's publisher, New Riders, doesn't have a place for folks to get at it either.]

I would recommend that anyone new to CSS should read a book that spoon-feeds you the basics before reading this one. At the proper stage of development, however, this book is an excellent stepping stone and deserves a place on your reading list and book shelf.

This book is an easy read and has a lot of great tips on enhancing code.

This book/author is simply fabulous in its capability to provide an almost componentized approach to the presentation layer of a website. It demonstrates how to build flexible and fast-loading web pages by minimizing the amount of markup code/html. Further, by abstracting much of the presentation code, using medium to advanced level CSS, economies of scope and scale could be had through reuse of the remarkable and substantive techniques presented in the text. Great Work!

His work really is bullet-proof. I've spent time playing with what he has in a variety of browsers, changing my text sizes on those browsers, etc...and this CSS is hard to break.

For those looking to take a basic knowledge of CSS to the next level, this is a great book. Basically, I had finally gone from table-based layout to CSS. While my work has been getting better, I think this book really helped me move it a step further. His practical examples are especially useful.

This is an excellent book on CSS. The title is a little misleading, as it is really about creating bulletproof web designs using CSS. It does not address any of the myriad of other topics that would make a site bulletproof like security, XHTML, web servers, application servers, etc. etc.

If you don't know what CSS is yet, then this book is certainly not for you. If you are looking for a basic getting started book on HTML, with a little on CSS I would suggest the VERY excellent Elizabeth Castro book, now in its sixth edition entitled "HTML, XHTML and CSS, sixth Edition" a Quick Start quide, of course available on Amazon.

Dan Cederholm's book "Bulletproof Web Design's" is a good companion to other more basic books, once you know that you want to use CSS to format web sites, and have a clue how to use it.

The one problem I have with this book, is that it _only_ provides the CSS. There is absolutely no HTML anywhere, which makes looking at examples a litle tough. The graphic illustrations of the results look great, the examples are useful, well explained and in a logical order.

This is certainly one of several books to have around when creating a modern web site with HTML and CSS.

In fact, it can be a good companion for those who both hand-code sites, and use professional tools like Dreamweaver.

So, as a CSS book, I give it 5 stars, as a general bulletproof web design book, I give it 3 stars, because it really has very little content about the other relevant subjects.. But, I'll be fair and rate this as a CSS book, title notwithstanding, and give it 5 stars.

The book is very helpful for web designers and web developers that are not "CSS masters" like me. I know a lot of CSS, but it is not my core expertise and often done by others with me doing only the development part of the website (the basic html, dynamic content and database integration).

It shows on very real examples the mistakes you can make, the consequences of those mistakes and solutions for how to do it right.
Being busy with solving other problems, people like me tend often to forget about the fact that there are different browsers with different settings are used by people and that your screen resolution might only be the resolution which is used by a fraction of the people using the Internet.

This book brings those issues on the table and provides straight forward and easy to implement solutions for those issues that save you time trying stuff yourself, only to run into new problems again.

I wish I would have bought this book much earlier. It would have saved me so much time and headaches.

overall this book is awesome, well written, with good common use info.
i think that it needs an introductory chapter though, for those who don't really know CSS yet but are buying popular books to learn.