Patrick S. Conwell said
The author focuses almost entirely on Internet Explorer, and isn't shy about it. He plainly states "history and popular opinion has elected Internet Explorer (IE) as the standard -- who are we to argue?" and then goes on to say "assume that your Web page visitors are either using IE, or are accustomed to the penalties for sticking with a fringe browser".
I can understand his logic in focusing on IE, but I don't think it's fair to us 'fringe' users who use a browser that actually follows the W3C standards. In my opinion, we *should* argue against bad and/or non-compliant browsers.
There is a good chance my website is vastly different from the 'average' website, so I don't present this as conclusive proof, but only 33% of my visitors are using IE while 41% use firefox and 26% use Safari. Thats a far cry from 90% IE (as the author claims).
If people keep supporting Microsoft's bad programing, Microsoft will keep writing programs that are not to standard and this book does little but promote Microsoft's bad programing. Further more, I suspect that in the not-so-distant future, we will see a shift towards firefox or some other compliant browser and most of the information in this book will become null and void.
Case in point, the very first example in the book will not work in Firefox. What's going to happen when IE8 or 10 or whatever comes along and Microsoft jumps on the W3C band wagon? All the pages written for IE will now be broken.
Additionally, even if most browsers are IE for now, I would be willing to put money on that most developers are running some flavor of Linux (as I am), and it would be nice to get generic information instead of Microsoft specific information. For example, instead of just saying 'save the file then open it in your browser', the author says 'In notebook, select file, then save, and then open the file in Internet Explorer'.
He really goes out of his way to dumb it down to the masses. Sure, the author may use language my mother can follow, but my mother doesn't even know what CSS is. It would be nice to have more generic information, even if it sacrifices a bit of clarity.
All-in-all, the book is a good starting point, but I would be hesitant to recommend this book to anyone, and I definitely would not recommend it to anyone that uses Linux or Mac or anything that is not Windows.
Kevin Connery said
If you're looking for an easy entry into learning CSS and don't care about portability between browsers and operating systems, this is an OK guide. It's easy to read, the tone is casual and friendly, and the basics are described fairly well.
If it's at all important to worry about how things will appear for anything other than IE on Windows, however, this is a very poor choice.
The author covers the basics of CSS fairly well, with only a few glitches and oversimplifications. Unfortunately, he also spends a lot of time complaining about the syntax, the design of the syntax, the designers of CSS in general, and dismisses the mere idea of validity checking, insisting the tools are too rigorous. That approach is carried through the book, with a deliberate exclusion of concern for usability outside one specific--albeit large--audience: current users of IE on current versions of Windows. Even the trouble-shooting section makes little mention of dealing with inconsistencies.
He notes that he won't waste time on theory--but does so frequently enough that it would have been faster to include the theory than the constant "I won't bother you with that" disclaimers.
If you already have a copy, it's not a horrible book to read. If you have any option and care about understanding how to design an effective webpage using CSS, I can't recommend spending money on it, however.
Schmendrick said
This book may have been useful in a IE6-only world. However, since the world has moved on, a book dedicated to CSS-for-IE6 is now outdated, at best. While I appreciate that he is writing from an IE-centric viewpoint and am OK with skipping functions IE doesn't recognize, including ActiveX in an introductory CSS book (in the beginning chapters, even) is simply misguided. Sure, you can fade your text ... if your viewer is willing to accept the ActiveX warnings.
Further, the author takes the Dummies "casual" approach (which I generally do not mind) beyond the level of good taste. He spends far too much time insulting the creators of CSS (among others), expects me to admire his inability to understand concepts, and actually crosses into condescending far too often. Here's a choice example: "Don't worry about why you use the (0). It's a quirk of computer languages that makes no sense - they start counting up from zero rather than one. Just use the code and don't bother your pretty head about it." (You have the opportunity to be told not to worry your "pretty head" about things more than once. Brilliant.)
Arrogance is one thing, but when there are as many sloppy errors in code and concept as there are here it becomes almost laughable. I can accept the occasional grammar or formatting error, but the code should be checked more thoroughly -- sometimes an error is repeated over and over. For examples, on several occasions he uses equal signs instead of colons, which might leave the beginner wondering a bit why the code misfires, and his demonstration of the nth-child selector is simply incorrect.
I can't say there's nothing to be learned from this book, and it has the makings of being a decent introduction to CSS. Some of his comments on style and avoiding tacky design may be helpful and he does a decent job of avoiding being too technical. However, I'm really glad I made use of the library for this one, and whoever checks it out after me will be glad of the corrections I've left behind.
Mitchell J. Laurrenring said
This was the first "Dummies" book I ever bought and is likely the last. The author has a clear bias against internet standards and is prone to go off on rants about committees and their supposedly bad decisions that make life hard for him. If he had simply stated his positions at the beginning of the book, it would have been fine, but the continual diatribes, many of which are ill-conceived and/or illogical, throughout the book are distracting.
Don't buy this book. Get the O'Reilly book on CSS. It is much more helpful and doesn't have any of Mansfield's bias.
Boyan Syarov said
It has some interesting examples, but it got into unnecessary explanation of the thousands of ways to address a tag, a bit annoying. Then I got to page 91, where the author tries to explain the difference between "relative" and "absolute" positioning of elements. Here I encountered one of my biggest pet peeves. I will let you read it yourself:
"Of course, as Albert Einstein pointed out, everything is relative except the
speed of light. So, when we speak of "absolute" positioning, it merely means
that we're being somewhat "less relative." What do I mean by this?
You actually cannot sit still, no matter how hard you try. When you think you're
sitting still, you're still moving at about a half million miles per hour as the solar
system spins around the galaxy. In fact, you're moving through space in a rapid
and complex corkscrew path. Even while you're quietly asleep, you're still flying
aboard the rotating earth, orbiting the sun, spinning around the galaxy. And the
galaxy itself is hurtling through the universe. So you're moving really fast in a
dozen different circles all the time. Luckily, so is your bed and everything else
in your room. They're all at rest, relative to you, but not relative to light."
What? Did he really..? I am staring away like Jim from The Office, into an imaginary camera right now.
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