Rating: 
Summary: Quick and clean introduction to CSS
Review: Cascading Style Sheets or CSS is one of the essential skills needed for web development. The greater degree of control that they give you over the appearance of your pages is well worth any and all effort it takes to learn how to use them. Fortunately, with this book in your hand that effort will be minimal.
I have taught CSS several times in a community education setting, but not for over a year. In an attempt to refresh my skills, I examined this book and went through a few of the more detailed examples. They all worked well and I learned several features of CSS that will be used in future classes. I also now recommend this book to students who ask for help in choosing a book to continue their study of CSS.
There is one obvious drawback to the book and that is the lack of color. One of the main advantages of using CSS is the excellent control it gives you over the use of colors. While the author makes an honest attempt to fill in the details with text, it simply is not enough to give you the full experience of how the colors will appear.
The coverage is thorough and the author also spends a great deal of time explaining the differing support of CSS in the major browsers. This is done via a series of charts called browser report cards and really helps to clarify what will appear, as the support for CSS among the browsers is somewhat arbitrary. In my teaching of CSS, my examples demonstrate many features, not all of which are supported. Students find this confusing and any information about the relative support is very helpful.
This is a sound book that will either get you up to speed or refresh your knowledge of CSS in a very short time. Maybe not quite in 24 hours, but close enough so that the difference is not significant.
Rating: 
Summary: Avoid at All Costs
Review: Do not buy this book if you want to learn anything about Cascading Style Sheets! It is so full of errors - including screenshots that do not illustrate what they are meant to illustrate - that the instructions are incomprehensible. In fact, the book doesn't actually lead readers through the creation of style sheets with exercises and projects. Rather, we are expected to download and view stylesheets the author has written. If you are looking for a good introduction to CSS try 'Eric Meyer on CSS' it is much more expensive but you'll learn what you've set-out to learn.
Rating: 
Summary: Makes CSS irresistible.
Review: First, some disclosure: I used to work for the author. Nevertheless, being in the teaching business myself, I can enthusiastically report that this is not only the best CSS book I have seen, but a model of writing. It is thorough, explicit, conversational, and funny--a much better read than just about anything else in this part of the bookstore. The author doesn't just give you technical definitions, and he didn't just write the book because he can. Instead, he presents the information in such a way that the book constitutes a 486-page argument for learning and using CSS. If you haven't been exposed to CSS yet, you are in for a treat. CSS cuts development time, enhances results, and provides for flexibility in content presentation. Advanced users note: this is not just another repackaged collection of introductory information. Although I have already made use of CSS I can see that my copy of this book will be well-worn before the year is out.
Rating:
Summary: Great Guide for Professional Developers
Review: I am one of the designers of the eCommerce architecture at an international plastics company, and after reading Teach Yourself CSS in 24 Hours, I am pushing our development teams to purchase several copies to have on hand. It's a concise, clear guide that is of great use to professionals who don't have the time to waste with traditional training programs.
Rating:
Summary: Big Waste of Time & Money
Review: I wish I had read the reviews before I bought this book. The revised edition simply has the typos corrected. At no time do you get the sense that an editor ever read this book. The language is mostly incomprehensible.
The online site that is supposed to give examples and style sheets redirects to a dog breeding site owned by the author. After I wrote an email questioning that, it was changed. I have yet to hear back from the publishers, SAMS, and I would avoid all of their books because of this waste of paper.
I started to make a list of omissions and vague descriptions after the 2nd chapter, but that list is too long to outline here. This is a very anti-design, techie look at CSS presenting an attitude that was out of date before the text was written.
The project I was working on through this book failed, but I now know that I know less about CSS than when I started this book. I am going to have to unlearn what little 'Teach yourself CSS in 24 hours' has taught me.
Rating:
Summary: Wished I had passed on this
Review: Poorly edited as to content as well as style. It was just plain boring to read, only awakening when encountering the many mistakes. Of course, that could be by design. Move on and keep looking.
Rating:
Summary: The browser publishers need this book
Review: This book is an excellent introduction to Cascading Style Sheets, presented in a style that is approachable and conversational, yet doesn't gloss over the details. The most valuable part of the book, though, is the no-punches-pulled assessment of how CSS elements are, or are not, supported in the real-world browsers, some of which are badly broken. If the publishers of today's web browsers would read this book and fix their implementations, the web would be a better place! Until then, we have to thank Kynn Bartlett for showing us how to do our best to work around the bugs.
Rating:
Summary: CSS Quick and Easy
Review: This has completely changed my attitudes towards the '24 Hours' series by Sams Publishing. It is also the first book to really convince me that web applications can be fun to create. For years and years I have been bogged down by repeating HTML time and time again thoughout web projects. CSS now gives me the freedom to put more creative thought into my webpages, as well as make the design nice and simple with out tens of thousands of messy HTML tags. I'm not going to comment on the editing mistakes as I believe that mistakes like that make you look twice and remember the content better. This is one of those books that i just couldn't put down. Great book, great technology and greater webpages forever! Woohoo!
Rating:
Summary: Indispensible for Good Web Authoring
Review: To quickly introduce myself: I have been working with the web very nearly since its inception, including recently teaching a course on design using HTML and CSS. That said, reading this book was of great use to me; I learned things I had never discovered before (some of which, happily, are currently supported by multiple popular browsers), and the guides to browser incompatibility are so useful as to deserve reprinting as a quick cheatsheet to use during the design process. The organization of material is sensible, and while the "hours" aren't really consistent as to how long the material took me to absorb, that should vary by person, so is to be expected. A word about printing errors: there are a few unfortunate ones in the first printing of this book. Each are thoroughly documented in errata on the website the author has provided as a personal courtesy, as well as the various example files and a few more goodies. (The reviewer that decided that he should stop after encountering a printing error and give the book one star, then say "the book may be worth the money" since he hadn't read much of it...well.) In conclusion, the author knows the subject thoroughly and communicated it clearly and entertainingly; his obvious concern for how much the reader gets from his book is commendable and is the basis for what an excellent resource the book is. To borrow a cliche, no web designer should be without this one.
Rating:
Summary: Indispensible for Good Web Authoring
Review: To quickly introduce myself: I have been working with the web very nearly since its inception, including recently teaching a course on design using HTML and CSS. That said, reading this book was of great use to me; I learned things I had never discovered before (some of which, happily, are currently supported by multiple popular browsers), and the guides to browser incompatibility are so useful as to deserve reprinting as a quick cheatsheet to use during the design process. The organization of material is sensible, and while the "hours" aren't really consistent as to how long the material took me to absorb, that should vary by person, so is to be expected. A word about printing errors: there are a few unfortunate ones in the first printing of this book. Each are thoroughly documented in errata on the website the author has provided as a personal courtesy, as well as the various example files and a few more goodies. (The reviewer that decided that he should stop after encountering a printing error and give the book one star, then say "the book may be worth the money" since he hadn't read much of it...well.) In conclusion, the author knows the subject thoroughly and communicated it clearly and entertainingly; his obvious concern for how much the reader gets from his book is commendable and is the basis for what an excellent resource the book is. To borrow a cliche, no web designer should be without this one.
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