Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: CSS - the best manual
Comment: I read this book as part of the 2006-2007 Jolt Awards sponsored by Dr. Dobb's Journal. This was an especially good book for me since I am not a web design person, and I was a real newbie to CSS. But this book got me really involved because McFarland makes CSS and all of its nuances so interesting. It's a technical book, but it's also just a great book: the presentation is logical, lucid and the topics incrementally build on each other. McFarland went to great effort to explain thoroughly each concept in text and graphical examples, and not to produce just another CSS reference manual. This is a book that is almost effortless to read. It gave me the best explanations of the foundational CSS Box Model and of "the Cascade" that I have read. Want to know how to us negative margins, in-line block displays, and when to actually use tables? They are all here. The only disappointment I have with the entire book is that the screenshots are in black and white, obviously a cost-saving decision. But I got used to it after a few chapters. If you are learning or working with CSS you will prize McFarland's tips on fixing the CSS bugs in all the major browsers, including the priceless litany of IE HTML hacks he offers up in each chapter. Don't miss this gem: it's a cover-to-cover read, and it won a well-deserved Jolt Productivity Award in the Technical Books category.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great, IMHO.
Comment: .
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I'm fairly new to CSS and found this book to be extremely helpful in picking off where my intro book left me. Does a very good job in explaining concepts and provides "tutorials" at the end of each chapter to reinforce those which were just taught. The book has encouraged my learning of CSS and I look forward to taking my skills to the next level. I would highly recommend this book for beginner/intermediate CSS developers.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Best book I have on CSS
Comment: I've got several books on CSS and this is the last one I have purchased, but I don't think I would have purchased the others if I had this one first.
It is very well-written and gives a lot of examples and tutorials. As I was reading it, a lot of light bulbs came on over things I had wondered about in CSS.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: A fairly excellent book; will get you up to professional speed quickly.
Comment: I bought this book along with Eric Meyer's book CSS: The Definitive Guide. I started reading Eric's book first and got through the first 1.5 chapters. I'll write a review of that book later. However, I wanted to get a bit more immediate knowledge, and that's where this book comes in. While it's content is mostly excellent, there were a few glaring problems with the book. Having said that, it's still an excellent read on the subject and therefore, comes highly recommended.
As I have already said, the content is mostly excellent. That means that there are some things the author says that I do not agree with. For one, the author seems (and I emphazise seems) to recommend using the HTML transitional DTDs. I would disagree. I know the author's point for mentioning these DTD is so that those websites that have traditional HTML 4.0/4.01 out there wouldn't have to be reformatted immediately if the DTD were changed to a strict type when one goes to update the site, however, I--like Eric Meyer--would stress that any new pages (or sites, for that matter) would be better off to use the Strict XHTML 1.0 (or 1.1) DTD right from the get-go. The things the transitional DTD's allow will eventually be phased out and is generally considered not good web design.
Here is one thing the author wrote I would never tell a beginner in CSS or HTML:
"Technically, you should place all the @import lines before any CSS rules, as shown here, but it's okay if you forget. Web browsers are supposed to ignore any style sheets you import after a CSS rule, but all current Web browsers ignore that restriction." (page 34)
First, I'm not sure that Firefox 2.0 ignores that restriction, nor Opera at whatever version it's at. Regardless, I would never count on the fact that a browser ignores a CSS implementation detail, even if we're talking about IE; afterall, browsers are updated all the time (at least, now with IE7.. ;) ) and are constantly adding greater and stricter support for CSS.
Besides those two examples of "technical" detail (which, in my opinion, don't make this book any less valuable), there is one thing that really annoyed me which is why I rated it 4 stars instead of 5--grammar.
The grammar is mostly excellent, but there is one aspect that you'll find annoying if you speak English as a first language: the author's use of contractions. For example:
"The headline's now massive in size." (page 36)
"To a browser, any tag's a box with something inside it--..." (page 133)
"Things get ever weirder when one element's inside another element." (page 138)
There are many more examples in between page 36 and page 133, and I'm sure more follow page 138 (as far as I've gotten in the book so far), but this really annoyed me. The apostrophe-s contraction is mainly used as a shortcut for " is" for only a few English words, like it (it's) or that (that's). But when used like the author has used it, it becomes very hard to tell what's meant to be a contraction and what's meant to be a possessive. The editor of this book should really have caught this improper usage of apostrophe-s and removed all the extraneous contractions, as it's really a huge distraction while reading this text.
Other than that, the book is technically very well written, just don't take everything as gold. This book will bring you up to speed quickly if you are a beginner to immediate HTML/CSS coder/designer. For a more thorough discussion of CSS and what particular browsers support which aspect of CSS and how, read Eric Meyer's CSS: The Definitive Guide published by O,Reilly. That book is more technical than practical (but still practical) whereas this one is more practical than technical. Eric Meyer's book is a lot more fun to read than the actual CSS spec itself (believe me, I've read the spec...boring...and confusing.).
If you want to get up to speed quickly, get this book. But also get Eric's book for the nitty-gritty details once you're up to speed.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Well written, informative, and fun to read
Comment: This book is well written and fun to read. Even though it probably wasn't necessary, I found myself reading it from cover to cover. With what I learned from this book, I went from "kind of knowing CSS" to "really knowing CSS" - I feel like a semi-expert on the subject now.
One drawback for me was the emphasis on using downloaded CSS samples - I prefer books which are designed to be read without using your computer at every step of the way. I'm sure this is a good way to learn, but I ended up skimming over most of the tutorial sections and just reading the "meat" of the book.
Still, I'm rating it as five stars because it was very helpful for me, and I'm sure these tutorials would be helpful to some people (just not me).
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