Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: A Must Have for Web Designers
Comment: This book is definitely a must have for web designers (or people like me who are learning web design). A friend of mine referred me to this book and I absolutely love it. It is very straight-forward reading and includes tutorials at the end of each section to reiterate what you have learned. The Missing Manual series is an excellent way to get you going on many different topics... for CSS, this manual is great even if you have very little experience with HTML.
Buy this book... It is well worth the cost. You will not be disappointed!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Fantastic Book!
Comment: Great introduction into the world of CSS. Having designed web pages in HTML since the 90's I'm way overdue to make the transition to CSS. This book has been absolutely easy to follow with great examples that cater to both beginners and more advanced users. I highly recommend this book even if you know next to nothing about HTML...it's a great place to start.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent introduction to CSS
Comment: As a technical manager for the past 23 years, I have purchased probably several dozen O'Reilly-published technical books. "CSS: The Missing Manual" is the first one that I have read cover-to-cover, followed all the tutorials, and then continued to reference the book later.
I needed help starting to learn and getting up to speed quickly with CSS, and this book was recommended to me. McFarland's combination of easy-to-read writing style, detailed and educational tutorials, and his occasional humor made this book fun and interesting. After I finished this book (over a few weeks), I felt comfortable enough with CSS to go further, experiment, and update many of my prior html-only web sites to CSS-based (and create a couple new ones).
I'd definitely recommend this book for folks who already have some familiarity with html but now like me need to go further and learn the intricacies of CSS. (And it was helpful to me that I was using Adobe DreamWeaver CS3 as my web site editing software). Great job by the author.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Great but...
Comment: Very good introduction to css and I just agree with all the other reviews. However, as hard as I tried I realized that there was not solution to liquid layout. The theory is great and David explanation misleads you into believing that it is feasible. But then looking at the css files on his site I realize that he himself does not really use liquid layouts. So why not just come out and say: this is the theory, but really it does not work, here is the very complicated work around. Would really avoid a lot of frustration in the readers.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good and Bad
Comment: I have to give this book a partial rating. Although I give it a 3 star, and the reasonings for that, is because the book is thurough in its teachings. The step by step instruction is very good, how he guides you through the steps and processes. The downside of this book, and many books out there that teach this subject, is that it teaches you how to do premade work. When you want to venture out on your own, is where you get confused. You learn how to do someone elses work, set it up, code it, where to place it. What these books need to do, is teach you how to do YOUR own work. To tell you to grab your OWN graphics, work with them, place them, whatnot. THAT is what good teaching is about. Teaching others how to do YOUR work, is not the way to get people to actually LEARN the product.
That is the only downfall to these kinds of books and in the future, good authors such as David Sawyer McFarland, as he clearly knows his subject, should teach people how to learn with their own work, as each layout is different, and is coded differently. Not ALL setups of CSS is going to work with how he teaches it, with his form of design. Which is pretty much, pretty basic to begin with. If maybe he taught more people how to do their own work, step by step, these books would be more worth the money. Then taking out hours of hard earned time learning someone elses work and not know what to do with your own once you completed it.
To someone who really wants to learn the subjects, books like this are a waste of time. I would rather spend time looking up freebie tutorials who will teach you how to code your OWN work, than spend fifty dollars on books that will teach you the opposite.
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