Rating: 
Summary: Excellent examples, very helpful
Review: I bought this book because I was interested in expanding my knowledge of web design and I was very pleased. Anyone who knows basic HTML will have no problem understanding the book. I recommend this for anyone who wants to learn more about Cascading Style Sheets and how they can easily be implemented into any webpage to add to the aesthetic qualities of the page and cut down on HTML markup tags in the code. CSS is easy, concise, and simple.
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Summary: Great presentation of CSS1 and where CSS is going
Review: This book is a great overview of the wonderful things that can be done with CSS in web development. Using CSS is a great way to make websites more accessible to the disabled while not losing the look of a well designed web page. This book is set up nicely and makes note of features that are not properly supported by the various browsers that are out there. It has a great overview in the back of each of the attributes that can be used in CSS and how they are to be applied and whether they are inherited etc. It's a great resource for those implementing the powers of CSS to clean up their html code.
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Summary: Thought you couldn't show print document in HTML?Think again
Review: In 4 words, This Book Is Great! It contains a very complete explanation of most CSS properties that you will need for your upcoming web sites. Positioning, Fonts & Colors, Boxes, Formatting; it's all there.For those of you who have to transition real print document (mostly suitable for PDF), well you will find a way to have your print document pretty similar to your current print document. In fact, one of the small case-studies is with this issue but if you go through the sections of boxes & positioning, you will find most of your answers there. Great reference and I would suggest to anybody that wants alternative to 'Table positioning' and other formatting issues.
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Summary: Amazing Coverage w/ Clarity
Review: Anybody wanting to learn CSS should buy this book. All that is needed is an understanding of HTML - - no previous CSS experience is necessary. The book starts out by explaining what CSS is, the need for it and why & how you should use it. You'll be taught different ways of linking style sheets to your HTML documents, and which of those ways is supported by which browsers [versions]. The meat of the book gives descriptions on each CSS element, practical examples, a heads-up on browser support issues, and even tips and tricks to work around those problems. This book is by far *the book* for learning, or even just brushing up on CSS. The only thing more I could have asked for with this book was coverage of CSS Level 2. CSS Level 1 was covered superiorly in this book, however Level 2 was barely touched on. Guess I'll have to wait for the next edition. -Jennifer
Rating:
Summary: Great Learning Tool
Review: Great book, well written and very easy to learn from. I purchased this book knowing nothing about CSS, and now I feel very confident and cleaned up my entire web site using this new and exciting technology!! I highly recommend Meyer's book and feel that it would be impossible not to get a lot of out it by just sitting down and reading it.
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Summary: Catch some trout today, be styling tomorrow!
Review: Page by page, feature by feature, Eric Meyer's 'Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide' puts a new face on the new face of the Web. I found this book to be useful at virtually every page: I was using CSS on my own homepage within minutes, and plan to expand that to the various websites I maintain, then to influence my officemates to join me in the quest for cascading styles. The only detracting point would be the constant use of Latin in the example text.
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Summary: Excellent "real world" application
Review: I have a great deal of HTML experience, but wanted a quick course in style sheets. This books was fabulous for not only giving clear instruction on how to use them, but also in pointing out common headaches in browser support. This is the first computer book I've read that represented a good midrange level tutorial...not a primer for beginning programmers, and not a technobabble encyclopedia of code. It's a must for any busy professional who just wants the straight story and doesn't have time to waste figuring out where the common pitfalls are. We all have jobs we need to do, not time to read tons of books! Kudos to O'Reilly for the first book I've liked from their presses!
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Summary: An excellent instructional introduction and overview.
Review: "Love yields in one moment," wrote Goethe, "what years of efforts can hardly attain." Farseeing as he was, I don't think that Goethe -- the poet, the dramatist, the statesman, the scientist -- had Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in mind when he waxed poetic about Love. But I fell in love with Style Sheets at first sight. Why? Because I realized that in mere moments CSS gave me gorgeous design effects that even the most cleverly worked-around HTML could never come near. Yet every love requires the lover to make sacrifices. CSS is more complex than HTML, and far more fickle: CSS is not fully supported by even the latest versions of the major Web browsers. Which means that in the real world -- oh, dear! - - some browsers will not be able to view your web pages made with Style Sheets, and other browsers will see things much differently than you had planned. In technology, as in life, Love is blind. Fortunately, there is help for both the weak-browsered and the broken-hearted. Two new books about Style Sheets, both lucid and superbly written, explain how style sheets work and how to get them to work despite the problem of browser ineptness. One of these books, XHTML 1.0 LANGUAGE AND DESIGN SOURCEBOOK by Ian Graham, which covers CSS in relation to XHTML, has been reviewed in BookLovers Review # 18. The other must-own work is Eric Meyer's Cascading Style Sheets, The Definitive Guide. To work with this book you do need a basic understanding of HTML 4.0, but you don't need any prior knowledge of CSS . What we really want in a computer book is an expert in the field taking us step-by-step through the basics, clearly and gradually, to higher and higher levels of proficiency. Eric Meyer is an acknowledged expert in the realm of Cascading Style Sheets. Meyer writes with a natural style, easy to follow, lively, and often reassuring. Here's one example of what I mean: after explaining the potential pitfalls about how your style sheets will look different in different browsers, Meyer writes: "Above all, though, regardless of how bleak things may seem, keep going! Your perseverance will be rewarded." How right he is to understand that computing beginners -- and even computing experts -- need not only information, but also encouragement! The book covers everything important about CSS1 in chapters titled: Selectors and Structure, Units and Values, Text Properties, Fonts, Colors and Backgrounds, Boxes and Borders, Visual Formatting, and Positioning. There's a penultimate chapter about CSS2 which lets us glimpse a supercharged version of Style Sheets: a web designer's Utopia with even more control and even more splendid effects. Meyer's final chapter, CSS in Action, explains three projects, all about how to convert to CSS from ordinary HTML and a magazine article in a printed page. There are some stunning effects illustrated here. In future editions of this book it would be valuable to expand this hands-on chapter. Expect to spend lots of time perusing this book's appendixes. One explains all the CSS1 properties; another contains a CSS Support Chart, showing which CSS properties are and are not supported by which browsers. What it all adds up to is everything I look for in a great non-fiction book: an expert teacher making a difficult subject interesting and clear. This is the heart of it all, and yet a few words need to be said about this book's design: it is gorgeous. Not flashy, but the typefaces are attractive, and the book has been designed with just the right amount of white space so that it's pleasant to look at and easy to read. Needless to say, there's a companion website to the book. The website offers Eric Meyer's Top Ten CSS Tips; the book's Contents and Chapter 1; and an insightful interview with Meyer. Web browsers are getting better, and the better they get, the more important CSS1 will be. Style Sheets are an evolutionary leap beyond HTML. Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, will teach you everything worth knowing in this domain. Meyer explains why you should be using Style Sheets, guides you from beginnerdom to Style Sheet mastery, and takes you and your website into the designing future that promises the best of both worlds: more structure and more style. Michael Pastore Reviewer
Rating:
Summary: Almost perfect
Review: This book is a perfect guide for those who want to write effective, maintainable and well structured HTML. CSS does have some nifty features, which you must read a book like this one to discover. The only downside is that it does not cover CSS2, it only provides an overview. CSS2 is very useful for styling XML documents, which I think he should have covered considering the recent publishing date of the book.
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Summary: The CSS Bible
Review: While all this information can be found online (which could be said about almost any web development language), the amount of attention paid to the subject is exceptional. As with most O'Reilly books I own, I have never felt they were a waste of time or money. Finally, someone has done justice to a subject that should be at the forefront of every developers arsenal of web development tools. I give lectures on web development and this is a subject that I stress to people over most others. The book is concise with very little fluff. It reads like a textbook. Buy this book!
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