Excellent Intermediate
Nicely written, very informative. My deduction of a star is for the reference having neither examples nor page numbers where a more detailed explanation would be found. This is a common omission, so I would still recommend this book. I would not recommend this as a first introduction to web authoring, as it is strictly CSS, which of course does nothing without structural mark-up. For those who have been building sites for a while, and need some guidance and insite into CSS, this is a great choice. However, for those who have very little or no experience I would instead recommend 'Build your website the right way...' by Ian Lloyd.
Complete coverage of CSS
As others have pointed out this is not a CSS "cookbook" full of design templates. If that is what you are looking for, you will be disappointed. If however, you want to understand CSS, how it works, best practices and so on, this is a great book. Although you can find all of the info in various places on the web, Mr. Meyer is a good author explaining in detail how things work and bringing up valuable points to be aware of along the way. A good addition to any web developers library.
Great only for resource
Most of the stuff that you learn in CSS can be found already ONLINE and before I bought this book, I had a very good fundamental understanding CSS and thought I buy this book for more knowledge and learn anything that I could have missed. Well I did, but I could have found this information online, however I've spent months learning CSS and it's very difficult to found all the things in this CSS book in one place.
I recommend this book if you have the stimulation to learn from a book and the money because of course the internet is FREE.
Not a Book on Website Design.
This book is a reference, and quite an excellent one at that. Definitely complete (as the title implies).
However, you won't really learn how to use CSS to design websites with it.
This book is for people who already have a pretty good handle on website design. I guess a good analogy would be that you can't learn English from the Oxford Dictionary, but the Oxford can certainly benefit you once you already know the language.
Got me up and running
Before I got this book, I knew basic HTML, and I knew that CSS could help me put all my design information in one place - fonts, colors, etc. I knew it could be used for layout, somehow, but all the tutorials and articles I'd read online had just given me bits and pieces.
This book gives a systematic explanation of CSS and how it works. I have read through it once, and although I haven't grasped every detail it gives, I have learned enough to completely rework some of my pages with CSS, making them much better than they ever were before.
If you want to use CSS for layout, you need to read this book. The concepts of positioning and floating made no sense to me before I read this, and I couldn't understand why things ended up in seemingly random places on the page. The diagrams showing margins, width, padding, etc made the whole thing a lot more intelligible. And the explanations of how to group classes were awesome, too.
This is a great introduction, a systematic explanation, and a useful reference.
(28 reviews)
