While I have an solid understanding of HTML and server-side development, I needed to get up-to-speed quickly on CSS, DOM scripting, and Ajax. This book has been the perfect primer, explaining the concepts clearly, giving practical code example with explanation, and organizing the information in a very usable format. The writing is concise and informed by the author's experience, without having the cutesy humor so many technical books seem to feel obligated to employ in an effort to make their text more interesting. This is a good read for its content, and the style supports the information presented.

In fact, I came onto Amazon to see what else the author had written, and was somewhat surprised at the lack of reviewer enthusiasm for the book.

This has been the only book I needed to get up to speed on interactive client side programming. The added bonus was that there are basic examples of all the interface tricks I was looking to implement for basic dynamic content, controls, and navigation.

While this book (Fourth Edition) appears to be another quality release from Peachpit, it is unfortunately plagued by typos (rather unusual for this publisher). Code simply will not run properly due to occasional errors (often replicated in both the inline code and the illustrative tables/diagrams) and filenames are frequently incorrect. In addition, the auxillary red spot color is a nice visual break from the typical black text at first but isn't always implemented properly and eventually feels distracting. However, the major concepts and methods are addressed and presented well in the text.

Overall, probably not the best book to start off with from unless you also enjoy debugging the author's code as you go along. I'd wait until a 5th edition corrects all the typographical errors.

This is a great book for learning CSS, DHTML & AJAX. I needed something quick to pick up this language and the book worked perfect.

A great book for beginners as well as a good reference tool for programmers as well. I bought this book for my 14 year old son who used it to teach himself. He said it was well laid out and has used it quite often.

I looked through this book at a bookstore before buying and I was impressed with the idea of working through with visual examples about what could be done with different manipulations of code (something that is hard to quickly get on the web with many many clicks).

In using this guide, I have though become frequently exasperated by the execution because of confusing examples, what I believe to be mistakes in the code examples in the text, etc...

I was looking for a book to get better acquainted with CSS and Ajax. I picked up "Visual Quick start Guide. CSS, DHTML & Ajax." From Peachpit Press. The book is a quick read and it efficiently provides a quick start guide as promised. I particularly liked the example based introductions for all topics covered. Also, I enjoyed the brief introduction the book provides on Web 2.0 and the way the authors define it.
After going through it once you will probably keep it as a quick reference guide, although it is never too hard to find information on web technologies on the web. Overall I could recommend the book if you are not a client side developer and are in need of a brief and comprehensive look at CSS and DHTML. I cannot imagine client side developers being too impressed with the book though.

The book does a good job of relating CSS to DHTML and AJAX. The examples are clear and, although simple, clearly demonstrate the interaffects of the 3 web design elements. I had to subtract a star for the inconsistencies between the book code and the downloadable code. They were serious enough to make book code fail. But, if you already understand CSS, are well-acquainted with HTML and can at least read Javascript, then this book will help you leap to DHTML and AJAX.

The book does a good job of relating CSS to DHTML and AJAX. The examples are clear and, although simple, clearly demonstrate the interaffects of the 3 web design elements. I had to subtract a star for the inconsistencies between the book code and the downloadable code. They were serious enough to make book code fail. But, if you already understand CSS, are well-acquainted with HTML and can at least read Javascript, then this book will help you leap to DHTML and AJAX.

I guess I'm spoiled after reading the Visual QuickStart guides by Larry Ullman on PHP and MySQL. In those you actually learn how to use the software by building or programming projects representing real world applications of the concepts being learned. That's the way you learn any skill -- by doing. Along the way, you also learn many valuable insights into why you're doing what you're doing. (It's also a lot of blood, sweat, tears, and frustration -- all an important part of learning!)

CSS, DHTML, & Ajax doesn't live up to that expectation. It's just another reference book, like countless other reference books on these subjects, and in this case, the number of such reference books is huge. If you like the style with lots of screenshots and don't already have a reference book on the subject, it might be worth buying. As one reviewer said, however, screenshots of code that reproduce what's already in the text just take up space that could be used for additional information. (They're very useful when you're actually building projects as a part of your learning.) Also, it's not as well organized and indexed as other reference books, such as those by Wrox. I can't imagine why Peachpit bothered to publish this one.

Just keep in mind that you won't learn to do CSS, DHTML, & Ajax in this book. You only learn skills by doing. Instead, you will read about them. That's a very different thing.