Rating: 
Summary: Great Explanation of CSS
Review: Though I had a basic knowledge of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), I did not know the full power of them. CSS has the ability to do many things, but basically the strength of it over plain HTML is that you are able to define a "style" to be applied to your whole website. To change the look and feel, you simply change a few lines in your style sheet and your whole site is updated. CSS can be used even if you have a site that consists of just one page.Eric Meyer's book will put you on your way to using CSS. A basic knowledge of HTML is helpful to understand the first part of the book. He jumps into the book as if this was a sequel to a book he just finished on HTML. He takes for granted that you understand how pages are built. Typical of many technical books, the information is often repeated so that you can jump into any chapter and get the basic information of how to make it work. That said, I only found one place in the book where he actually tells you how to link to a style sheet. Therefore, you need to read much of the introductory material. If you have an understanding of CSS and this is going to be a reference work, you will not be disappointed.
Rating: 
Summary: Excelent book, but not up to date anymore
Review: As almost all O'Reilly books, this is a great technical book. Great info, great index, and great organization. The author is a CSS guru. Unfortunatelly the contents aren't up to date with the current browser technology. The 2000 edition doesn't even know about the newst Mozilla versions (a.k.a. Netscape 6). Wait for a newer edition, or buy another one.
Rating: 
Summary: a great intro to css
Review: If you ever wanted to learn about css this is the place to start. Eric not only covers all of css1 and an intro into css2, he warns you of all the caveats regarding browser combatibility.
After you read this book and follow it up with his book on web design, you'll have all you need . Not only can you throw out alot of your html code, but css can give you a workaround where html doesn't seem to have the answer.
Eric also gives alot of good online sources where you can find tricks for applying css, as well.
And finally, he writes in a style that is more like reading a novel then a text book.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book
Review: I learned CSS from this book. It's probably not the best book for an introduction to CSS, but it worked quite well for me. As part of O'Reilly's Definitive Guide series, the book has a format which is awkward for a beginning text. These books are meant to be encyclopedic in coverage, so every topic gets discussed down to the last arcane detail before you move on to the next one. That's probably not the approach I would take if I were teaching a course on the subject. But that was probably not the intent of the book. The odd thing was, the writing was so good that the book worked quite will as an introduction. Eric Meyer is one of the world's top experts on CSS, and he is also a marvelous writer. That is an unusual combination, and one that readers should take note of. Over time, I will probably acquire all of Meyer's books. He is that good. Don't expect this to be the only book you need on the subject. The web is a fast changing medium, and books tend to lag behind the material that is accumulating on the web itself. There is excellent materail on sites like zeldman.com, meyerweb.com, alistapart.com, webmonkey.com and elsewhere. There are also other books which take different approaches, which will fill in some of the gaps. That is to be expected; no one book can do it all. Unfortunately, the book is getting a little outdated. Many modern browsers are supporting CSS2 by now, and proposals for CSS3 are already circulating. Meyer is already at work on the second edition. We all have something to look forward to.
Rating:
Summary: A very good shot at a moving target
Review: Not really a reference, but more than a simple tutorial. This is the best book I've seen about Cascading Style Sheets, and went a long way to convincing me that CSS had finally arrived in Prime Time. But even though they've long since "arrived," they're still very much on the move. Meyer's terrific website offers an elegant glimpse into state-of-the-art CSS. He's done marvelous things with the technology, things that simply never would have occured to me as lending themselves to a CSS solution (eg, pure CSS popups--no javascript involved). This book is a worthy investment for any serious web developer.
Rating:
Summary: First step is a doozy---
Review: The first few chapters are a bit much to swallow all at once, (for a CSS newbie) and you can't skip over them and go on, because you'll be completely lost. Once you get through that initial brain-meltdown, though, Meyer uses example after example to walk you through the actual uses of CSS. It's an excellent book, and I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to understand Cascading Style Sheets. O'Reilly need to contact Eric Meyer and have him update it. I'd go out and buy it again.
Rating:
Summary: Very detailed and complete!
Review: This book was another great O Reilly book. The wealth of information packed into very easy to understand language. As long as you are familiar with HTML then you will learn what really appealing things you can do for a web site with the help of style sheets. The book covers all the information you need about the browser compatibility issues, fonts and text properties, even element units and values. It has a great overview in the back of each of the attributes that can be used in CSS. How they are to be applied and whether or not they are inherited. This was a very informative book and a great reference book!
Rating:
Summary: Complete
Review: This is the only book you need on Cascading Style Sheets. It is absolutely complete, and will allow you to get started right away designing simple style sheets. On the other hand, if you are willing to take the time to browse other designer's code while simultaneously using this book, you will find yourself designing complex style sheets right away! Before picking up this book, I was familiar with style sheets in the most basic sense. Within a week, I was designing moderately complex stylesheets more or less on my own, only occasionally using the book for reference. I can now easily write CSS on my own and no longer "need" the book, but I do still often find myself referring to it while using some of the trickier positioning elements. It has been an invaluable reference. I give this book five stars and, based on my description above, I think it is clear that recommend it to anyone who wants to use CSS; HOWEVER, there is one caveat - this book does not cover the CSS2 specification in depth. When it was written, CSS2 was on the horizon, but not yet a reality. The book therefore has a chapter that talks theoretically about CSS2, but it cannot give hard and fast rules or make definitive statements about the specification. Now that CSS2 is a reality, however, the book is slightly dated. If you are interested in making an investment in this book, you may wish to visit the O'Reilly Web site and see if a new edition is soon forthcoming. If so, I would recommend waiting for the 2nd. Ed.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent, Comprehensive Guide to CSS1
Review: Most people who have happened to work on web pages know something about stylesheets--yet very few actually know how to properly take full advantage of their features even at the "level 1" standard fairly well supported by most web browsers today. If you've struggled to make a web page look like you want it, resorting to multipe FONT tags, tables, and formatting tags, then you need this book. If you've written a stylesheet or two but find yourself creating and applying styles to the point it seems more trouble than it's worth, this book is for you. From what I learned, I cut both the size of stylesheets and web pages for a number of both personal and company web pages--at times by more than a half--simply through a better understanding of the workings of stylesheets. Beginning with the basics of what stylesheets actually are and building upon that basis with concepts like cascading, selectors, elements and pseudo-elements, the book will give readers an understanding of CSS difficult to appreciate merely through reading over other people's web pages or through trial and error. An exhaustive treatment of each sort of style--from fonts to inline elements to boxes--follows and covers nearly everything one could want to know about CSS1. That said, the book could use an update as since 2000 the browser wars have evolved as has the application of CSS2, which is only touched upon by the book. However, unless you are already a pro at styles, you'll likely find this an invaluable reference, much as any title in the O'Reilly series.
Rating: 
Summary: Academic and dry
Review: Yes, this book is a good reference for CSS, AND it has some good charts and references in the back. The index is weak. However, if you have a problem with spacing, or font size, or inheritance in your stylesheets, this book is difficult to use -- because it is organized by the formalisms of CSS, rather than by what one might what to do with CSS, like change the appearance of headings in certain contexts, or adjust spacing in complex documents. We use a lot of classes in our html, and the section on classes was fairly shallow. There isn't enough room given to examples on how to use classes with div and span, and elements inside classes (especially h levels). The author's sense of humor also becomes a bit tiresome, especially if you're trying to use the book to solve a difficult problem quickly. I doubt that many readers are as captivated with the author's humor as he was when writing the book. The book is now rather out of date -- the pre-CSS browser warnings seem a bit irrelevant, and there is of course the growing use of XML, which needs to be accommodated.
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