Great CSS Book
I honestly didn't use CSS too much in the past and I always used tables for my layout. However, this book has quickly shown me everything I needed to know to become proficient and confident in using CSS; it has also allowed me to discontinue using tables (except for certain situations, i.e. tabular data). This book is a very easy read and a great reference to keep on your desk for all your CSS needs.
HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS
In my opinion the book was lame. It was apparently written by an author with limited web experience particularly for large scale web sites. The theory of the book is okay, but the details of how to pull this off in a large web site are not discussed. The book is called Designing Without Tables, however nearly 1/3 of the book is dedicated to designing with tables. Might be good for a college student, but not in the real world of Google, Amazon, Yahoo etc.
Useless as a Reference
I purchased this book hoping to use it as a reference to solve various CSS issues that crop. Unfortunately the various chapters don't show how to actually use any of the knowledge its supposed to impart. For example, it'll show an example, and then display various extra code that it says should be "added" to the page. Added where? At the top? Bottom? Inserted inside a DIV tag? Which one?
I can understand a book not having any concrete examples if its going to concentrate on the subject at a conceptual level, but it doesn't explain the concepts either. For example, in the section on positioning it doesn't say more than "absolute" means absolute, and "relative" means relative. That's nice, but doesn't leave me understanding any more how to actually design a page than I did before reading the chapter.
easy to read
This book is easy to read. I am using it pretty much as a reference book. I do wish it would have been a bit bigger of a book with more indepth examples but thats why they have website.
Great Beginner CSS Book
Web design has always been a hobby for me, so I spent a good part of my life in the dark about style sheets. They've really only surfaced as an essential skill in the past few years, and even today a large amount of sites don't utilize them. This book is an excellent introduction to CSS. It is written clearly, without superfluous language, and is accessible to beginners. After reading it, you will have a very good understanding of CSS and you will be able to build your own webpage using current web standards.
The book begins with a basic overview of CSS - it breaks down the syntax, talks about what CSS can do, and tells you why it is a better choice for design than standard HTML tables (CSS is faster and easier to maintain, and the book tells you why).
The next section is a case study. The authors walk you through the creation of a CSS-only page (no tables!), and it's pure magic for someone who's never used CSS before to see how everything comes together. A second case study follows, and the 2nd edition also includes a new case study on how to build a 3 column layout with a footer.
The book is over 500 pages long, but a good 40% of it is an appendix that lists every single CSS declaration and describes their proper syntaxes and when and how to use them. The appendix alone makes the book worth buying as a valuable reference.
A must buy for the beginning CSS developer.
