When searching for a technical manual, I usually am able to narrow the field down to just 2 or 3 that together will cover my needs.

I sat down with a stack of about 15 books on CSS, including the most popular listed on Amazon, and started thumbing through them to evaluate their content, organization, reference material, indexing, etc. I eliminated several books, and had a tall stack of possible books to one side when I opened this book. I was first struck by the simple beauty of the book layout. The material in this book is presented in an exceptionally pleasing manner, easy to read, and well punctuated with examples and graphics. Code is colorcoded so the reader can easily pick out the portions being described in the text, and followed by color photos of the actual screens resulting from the code.

The book is logically organized and includes the best and most comprehensive reference section of all the books I considered.

The topics are easy to read and clearly presented. There are exercises to do which allow the reader to actually test-drive the techniques described and accompanying code files are available on the website to go along with the book.

I was surprised to find one book that contained everything that I look for in a technical manual. Hurray! I didn't have to buy 2 or 3 books to cover all the bases.

Thank you Richard York.

this is a good book for the beginner who likes a lot of repetition and hand holding. there is A LOT of overviews, introductions, transitions, summations, and examples to reinforce the concepts being taught. as you might guess, there is A LOT of overlap when the writer and/or editor chooses this type of writing style.

i did learn a lot from reading it, and i did retain the information. however, i might bravely suggest that i could have done this anyway, even if the book contained prodigiously less reiteration.

i would have unreservedly given the book at least 4 stars if it had been more condensed. but that's how bad the repetition was in this book. it got pretty exhausting at times, for the reader.

for a future edition, i would recommend to the writer and/or editor to cut out all of the needless verbosity.

i'm sorry. i really wanted to like this book. partly because i hate wasting money on bad books. but i just didn't. i felt so BEAT DOWN after reading just 3 chapters. but since i like to follow through on the things that i do, i hunkered down and finished the book, even though i was really dreading it.

let me start out by saying that there is a lot of good information in this book. however, mr. york (i imagine) must believe in the power of repetition because he BEATS the reader over the head with the same explanations again and again and again!

for example, he has a brief overview of an entire chapter in the beginning. fair enough. then, within each section, he has a brief introduction into that section. okaaaay. then, at the end of each section, he has a brief transition into the next section. alriiiiiiiight. then he lathers, rinses, and repeats.

okay, you're thinking. i can handle that. but wait. there's more.

within each section, he repeats himself over and over and over again. for example, on page 40, during his discussion of 'relative measurements', he shows the readers a table that tells us the 'ex' unit abbreviation represents the 'the x-height of the relevant font (height of the letter x)'. then, on page 42, he tells us again, 'the ex unit is based on font size ... (and) based on the height of the lowercase letter "x".' yet again, in the 1st sentence of the VERY NEXT PARAGRAPH, he tells us a 3rd time 'the ex mesaurement ... is based on the font size. however, the ex measurement is relative to the height of the loswercase letter x.' DUDE! we read you! the first time! and the second time! the third time is really getting on our nerves! get on with it already!

in some cases, he even reiterates himself IN THE SAME SENTENCE. i kid you not! page 8 - 'for that reason, the software implementing a specification is referred to by the w3c as the user agent, which is a generic term that encompasses all the different types of software that implement w3c specifications.' HUH??? didn't you just say that last part, guy?? like, in the first part of the same sentence???!!!

he writes in this EXACT SAME PATTERN ad nauseam throughout the book! i found myself being really resentful of having to read all this repetition, when just ONE sentence, AT MOST two, would have served his purpose even better!

i can't in all honesty recommend this book. css, while involved and convoluted at times, is not that difficult a subject to learn. and mr. york is NOT making it any easier or more enjoyable for the reader by reiterating himself to such an excessive extent!

for a future edition, i would recommend to the writer and publisher to cut out all of the needless, mind numbing, repetitive verbosity. until then, i would have to advise a reader to go with another book, if another good option exists.

This book is what it's intend to be: an excellent book for CSS beginners. Good sequence of chapters, good examples, and the wellcome surprise of color sintax and screen pictures.
Congratulations to Wrox, and I expect that other books could be printed with same quality presentation.

I bought five different books on CSS in my quest to learn this throughly.

This was the most comprehensive "hands down." I particularly liked the methodical way the author went through each group of properties with extensive examples. I could not find a single coding error in the entire book, and I tried every example.

In addition he addresses the way different browsers handle CSS, in particular Internet Explorer, and shows how to overcome these obstacles.

After spending two weeks reading this in detail I had one question. My e-mail to Mr York received a detailed reply within two hours.

In conclusion, I consider this one of the very best IT manuals I have come across and recommend it to anyone.

The author doesn't tell you how to fix the bugs various browsers have with CSS. So if you learn CSS from this book, and build a web site using CSS that you learned from this book - your web site will not display correctly in many browsers. I gave up learning CSS because of this book because i thought that there was no way to get it to work the same and look the same in all browsers - since the author of this book just says "this doesn't work in such and such browser", "this won't work in ie version X", etc. But there are ways to make it work - he just doesn't tell you. So you end up learn to write CSS code that doesn't work. And what good is creating a website in CSS if it doesn't work properly in popular browsers?

First, I've got almost 20 years of programming under my belt, the last ten mostly web programming and design. During my career, I've probably spent thousands of dollars on books, especially programming related books. In my 20 years, I would have to rate the ease of learning, clean - to the point - examples, and a genuine "good feeling" (after finishing the book) that the money spent on this title is well worth every penny.

If your a complete beginner with no clue (or just confused from reading some other CSS book) about css selectors, inheritence, id's, classes, the box model, positioning, floating elements? Then this book is for you!

On the other hand, if you have a little "old school" HTML under your belt and ready to make the plunge into CSS and XHTML, this book provides for smooth transition from beginner and aptly prepares you for any advanced CSS books that you might tackle.

Even though I have read many other intermediate and advanced css books -- I can still come back to this book (as a reference now) and find something fresh.

I honestly wish authors and publishers would seriously look at the fabulous layout and teaching style that the author presents and incorporate it into every book published for technical titles. If you are a professor that teaches intro CSS or web design, this book is ideal for the classroom (and includes sample exercises). Well worth a look into!

In conclusion, if your a CSS beginner, or someone that may have already picked up the basics and are still confused about CSS, buy this book. I dearly think that you won't find a more clear and concise introduction - through - intermediate CSS book on the shelf.

Beginning CSS: Cascading Style Sheets was written very clearly and the instructions were appropriate and real-world oriented. The author also included exercises at the end of each chapter that allow you to use what you just learned...like homework problems.

The fact that the book is in full color helps tremendously with comprehension of style sheets because you can easily see the changes made to a site when the sheet is altered.

The drawback: the book doesn't get into more advanced style sheets and more difficult problems designers face. I guess that's why they've written a "Professional" version of this book.

I'm only halfway into Chapter 3 right now and I can definately say the 2nd edition of this book is a must have for any web developer. Having the code and screen shots in color gives it that extra zing. It's good to see the real effect in a color screenshot for those times you don't need or want to type the entire example. Having a given topic's code in color makes it so much easier to read too. This is a great feature for anyone who uses a "fancy" text editor to color code for them.

The author has also done a great job at explaining the topic in a nice "short and sweet" manner. There isn't any fluff that turns a topic into its own novel like some books I've read.

I've read several books about CSS over the last three or four years, but this book has to be the most complete I've seen. Not only does Mr. York obviously know this material quite extensively, he does it in a way that makes total sense. And this book is not just for beginning web developers either, there's quite a bit of information that more experienced developers can learn about. I also liked the various code examples in color. It helps to make the specific code stand out much more when it's in a different color than the code around it. This of course helps the reader to understand and remember it more effectively.

The author also takes time to talk about the differences in browsers and how each one presents the code. There are few things more aggravating to a web developer than having to deal with the various quirks of each browser. What looks great in IE may not look so hot in Firefox or Safari. And vice versa. The author cites various examples of this throughout the book, as well as "workarounds" for each "issue."

Another thing that makes this book so enjoyable is how the author goes through step by step instructions on how to achieve a particular style. This is one way to show how styles affect presentation.

It's amazing how powerful CSS has become over the last few years. There's a lot you can do with styles and Mr York has shown all web developers ways we can take advantage of this power.

the book is very interesting and helpfull i never thought that you could learn so much with a book

I knew nothing about Cascading Style Sheets before I bought this book. I did learn a lot and definitely use CSS in my websites now. The book is good if you read through from start to finish, which I did. But now that I want to go back and find particular pieces of information, coding examples, or little "tricks" to program what I want, it is very difficult to find what I am looking for. The book is NOT layed out as a reference. The mini coding examples are basic, to the point, and help you learn. However, the large coding example that keeps building throughout the book is not that great in my opinion. The Beginning CSS book did teach me enough to combine with JavaScript to do some cool (basic) dynamic web stuff. (If you know a little JavaScript I definitely recommend the Professional JavaScript by the same publisher!)

Now that I understand the basics of CSS I want to learn more. I looked through the Professional CSS book and definitely want to get that- that is the next book on my list to purchase. If you think you can skip over the "Beginning" CSS book then I would go straight for the "Professional" CSS.

My son thought the book was great!

Author's style of explaining the concepts is very thorough and easy. Book is enriched with the concepts. Thanks to this book for clearing the layout, font and

This is my favorite book about CSS. Thanks to this book I need less HTML-code then before, and it's very easy to give all pages of 1 website exactly the same 'look'.

Some of the reviewers complain that a lot the examples don't work in Internet Explorer 6.0. All viewers of my websites use IE6, but I still found this book very useful:
-I try things out using Mozilla
-only if something doesn't work in IE6
( like input[type="submit"] ),
I use an extra class="button" in my webpage, and also add the extra .button{..} to my stylesheet.
-this book will help you prepare for IE7, because IE7 supports more of CSS.

In short: highly recommended.

Hi - this is a good book to get into the nitty gritty of CSS. There is definitely a lot of useful information in here and all of the meat of CSS is covered.

My only complaint is that it is difficult to navigate through, at least for me, and I feel that things could have been presented in more intuitive fashion. One of the biggest strengths when I bought the book was that I saw it took you through a complete website that is actually servicing a customer, from start to finish. In retrospect, I feel that this might have been the biggest weakness, as he had to sometimes delay telling you certain aspects of what was going on because he had not covered that yet. Also, it was difficult to keep flipping around to find things, like for example he presents the code for his site at the end of chapter 8, and then re-presents it in Chapter 10 - I kept having to flip between those 2 chapters to see the markup. Additionally, he kept modifying the markup so that the code in Chapter 8 didn't necessarily keep holding true to what was going on.

Basically, you really need to concentrate on everything, and I found myself flipping between pages, back and forth, analyzing what the author had done and how it affected the content of his web pages. Once I figured out what he was doing, it was "Aha! I see it now" -- unfortunately it often took a lot of effort to really determine what was happening. I know, 'concentrate' and 'effort' are not four letter words, but my point is that this is not necessarily a reference book, or something that will assist you in getting up to speed overnight. What it will do, if you have the patience to work through it, is give you a lot of good fundamentals.

As someone that is building a site, kind of concurrently using many different books on PHP, MySQL and PSP, I wanted to have something that I could use to reference quickly to give me a framework to build on. This book has been a disappointment in that regard, but I have a feeling I will appreciate it later on, as I really am starting to sense I have a good grasp of the fundamentals. I originally gave this book 3 stars out of frustration, but have felt so guilty about it that I wanted to change the review and give it 4 stars. It won't let me change the star rating, which is unfortunate, but hopefully people will read this.

The author also has a site where he answers questions promptly, which is nice.

This book should have been wonderfully useful. Most Wrox books are wonderfully useful. This one isn't because the designers have taken over the asylum.

The author decided to completely ignore Internet Explorer - the browser used by 85-90% of the populace - until Chapter 18. Until then, he presents CSS concepts that mainly don't work in Internet Explorer. They do work in the marginal browser Opera, which has such a miniscule market share that it's safe to ignore.

I want a book for the real-world, not one that exists in designer fantasyland. It's hard enough convincing average, workaday designers to switch from tables to CSS - the switch has a steep learning curve. Books like this one discourage workaday designers from making the effort. Why should they bother learning the CSS in this book if it doesn't work in the browser that 85-90% of their audience and/or customers use? Someone at Wrox should have reined in the author and explained the marketplace to him.

As part of the 98% who use either Internet Explorer or Firefox, I'd like to ask the 'designerati' to use their blogs for the fancy stuff and to write their books for the average users who buy them.

Bob McLain