Haydee T. Gusler said
This is a good investment for anyone that is a beginner on CSS believe me! I am a graphic designer in transition from printed materials to web and is very useful.
Garth Snyder said
This is the only CSS book the world needs. Half the information in this book is unavailable anywhere else -- and it's the half that always trips you up, too. This book will catapult you from "frustrated, bawling baby-man or baby-woman" to "smooth-codin' CSS pachuco" in no time flat.
CSS is a pretty well-designed system, but the general problem of layout is more complicated than it seems on the surface. The concepts look simple -- margins, sizes, positions -- but experience shows that you can't rely on your intuitive expectations of reasonable behavior. For example, CSS looks for all the world as if left and right were analogous to top and bottom. But in fact, horizontal and vertical layout are different systems that use rather different rules. Gotcha!
In the CSS domain, there is just no substitute for actually studying and understanding the system. You have to know the specific rules through which CSS properties are turned into geometry, and that's what this book provides. It's clear, concise, and authoritative.
Without this book, your life is not worth living.
Leam Hall said
Eric writes in a clear and detailed way that really communicates. This is especially challenging when an artistic concept has to be explained in technical detail!
If you just need a little CSS, check out Eric's articles. If you're tasked with supporting several sites with diverse text requirements, or you're into heavy CMS configurations like Joomla! A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website, read the book!
Joshua Cunningham said
A solid plot, well-formed characters, and an intriguing writing style make this... wait, what?
This is a boring, very useful book. I've read a lot about CSS on the web and nothing came close to the explanation in this book. Instead of saying things like "we won't bother you with the complex way this is calculated," Meyer bothers you with the complexity. Each property I read made me really understand how it works and how it should be used.
I've been reading this bad-boy from cover to cover and I think I'm doing myself a bit of a disservice. I think I'm going to skip to the positioning section (everyone could use a better understanding of this mysterious and magical world), read that, maybe read a few other things I'm interested in mastering and then leave it as a reference. It makes a lot more sense to read the properties you don't understand than trying to get through it all.
Learn (x)HTML and CSS online, then buy this book if you're serious about getting into web page design.
Jack Harich said
I feel obliged to review this book after being unable to accomplish a simple css task: designing an improved css file.
Meyers knows his subject. But he keeps using fancy examples or unnecessarily complex coverage that detracts from the content non-experts need to learn. For example, I was attempting to figure out why a certain case of inheritance is failing. His section on that is too complex to follow, because he covers the entire inheritance resolution scheme of css, rather than the simple cases that most frequently appear. So I was never able to solve the problem. I had to resort to searching the net.
After reading the first few chapters, I needed to go back and find where he discussed first-child. Skimming did not find it, so I checked the index. It's not there! So I was forced again to search the net.
This could have been resolved by writing clearly. Every time you introduce something of importance, bold it or put it in a section heading. Then skimming will allow finding it easily.
At this point I decided the book was not quite worthy of sitting on the same shelf as my dozens of other web dev books, and so I tossed it in the trash. Your mileage may vary, but for me it's a time waster.
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