A real educational experience. Also a well defined book. Be ready to learn when you read this book. This book gets two thumbs up.

Take a look at O'Reilly's "JavaScript, The Definitive Guide". That's a "Definitive Guide". Eric Meyer's "CSS, The Definitive Guide" is not. "CSS, The Definitive Guide" is a guide for those who already know CSS. And, it's written like a seminar for those who already know CSS.

There are very few useful code samples and nothing that explains CSS in any practical sense for someone who isn't very familiar with it.

I've been an O'Reilly fan for years and I've learned to know what to expect from an O'Reilly book. This book doesn't have any of it.

If you're a CSS expert and want a reference book to add to your shelf. Add this one. However, if you're learning CSS, this book has nothing to offer.

Before purchasing this book, I had purchased about a half dozen books on css, one from the same author. I was really surprised to find new ways to use css that I hadn't learned in the other books. Each topic is discussed completely and in detail. For a reference on css, this book is the best I've found.

This is a book about CSS, and CSS, is about the presentation aspect of web pages. How the text appears, the size, the layout, etc.

However, the presentation style inside the book is kind of sloppy. For example, on page 186 and 187, when it talks about inline elements, Figure 7.33 "Strongly emphasized" is printed not as tall as Figure 7.34 and 7.35 when the CSS style is the same. And the word being used is "which is" and is changed to "that is" in Figure 7.34 and 7.35, when it is changing the vertical-align only. The reader would be better helped if they can see the contrast of the CSS style, without the change of wording for no reason at all. Also, in Figure 7.34, the bigger words should not overlap with the smaller words above, as tested in CSS compliant browsers, but it is printed so on the book.

Then again, in Figure 7.36, for no reason at all, the picture is shrunk down to 1/4 size of the previous examples, when they are all talking about the same case except for some vertical-align difference. It may be done just because the page is running out of space. That is pretty sloppy.

On page 181 to 182, it talks about various terms of the inline box model, and there is no figure at all to exemplify the terms at all. Then after the reader goes through a tough time to read through those text of hard definitions, 3 pages later, the figures start to appear. Please, can the book be designed so that the readers are considered? CSS is partly for making the content easy for the audience, and how about this CSS book is made easier for its audience too?

Nicely written, very informative. My deduction of a star is for the reference having neither examples nor page numbers where a more detailed explanation would be found. This is a common omission, so I would still recommend this book. I would not recommend this as a first introduction to web authoring, as it is strictly CSS, which of course does nothing without structural mark-up. For those who have been building sites for a while, and need some guidance and insite into CSS, this is a great choice. However, for those who have very little or no experience I would instead recommend 'Build your website the right way...' by Ian Lloyd.

As others have pointed out this is not a CSS "cookbook" full of design templates. If that is what you are looking for, you will be disappointed. If however, you want to understand CSS, how it works, best practices and so on, this is a great book. Although you can find all of the info in various places on the web, Mr. Meyer is a good author explaining in detail how things work and bringing up valuable points to be aware of along the way. A good addition to any web developers library.

Most of the stuff that you learn in CSS can be found already ONLINE and before I bought this book, I had a very good fundamental understanding CSS and thought I buy this book for more knowledge and learn anything that I could have missed. Well I did, but I could have found this information online, however I've spent months learning CSS and it's very difficult to found all the things in this CSS book in one place.

I recommend this book if you have the stimulation to learn from a book and the money because of course the internet is FREE.

This book is a reference, and quite an excellent one at that. Definitely complete (as the title implies).

However, you won't really learn how to use CSS to design websites with it.

This book is for people who already have a pretty good handle on website design. I guess a good analogy would be that you can't learn English from the Oxford Dictionary, but the Oxford can certainly benefit you once you already know the language.

Before I got this book, I knew basic HTML, and I knew that CSS could help me put all my design information in one place - fonts, colors, etc. I knew it could be used for layout, somehow, but all the tutorials and articles I'd read online had just given me bits and pieces.

This book gives a systematic explanation of CSS and how it works. I have read through it once, and although I haven't grasped every detail it gives, I have learned enough to completely rework some of my pages with CSS, making them much better than they ever were before.

If you want to use CSS for layout, you need to read this book. The concepts of positioning and floating made no sense to me before I read this, and I couldn't understand why things ended up in seemingly random places on the page. The diagrams showing margins, width, padding, etc made the whole thing a lot more intelligible. And the explanations of how to group classes were awesome, too.

This is a great introduction, a systematic explanation, and a useful reference.

Having read Dan Flanagan's excellent definitive guide on javascript, I was looking forward to Eric Meyer's definitive guide on CSS. Also, I have been impressed with the O'Reilly's books on my shelf. I figured this was a "could not miss". However, after only a chapter into the book I found myself doing google searches to fill in gaps. The information on page layout is especially skimpy. I do not consider myself an expert in web page design, but I am willing to dig in and learn. Trouble is, I had to do it on google.

This book could be organized a little more intuitively, but all-in-all it has the stipulations and definitions you need from the CSS standards in a printed form. I would recommend the pocket guide as well.

I've managed development efforts for several years and, although I'm an advanced developer in ASP.Net and numerous server-side technologies, felt I was too much at the mercy of "the web guys" on my project teams when it came to making decisions on content design. So, a couple years ago I purchased Richard York's "Beginning CSS" (Wrox Press) and found it to be an excellent primer on CSS. Having designed my own style-sheets for the couple years since, I realized I still had some questions as to the finer points of CSS design techniques.

I purchased Eric Meyer's "CSS: The Definitive Guide" and consider it an excellent second volume on the subject. If you are brand new to the topic of CSS, I'd recommend one of this author's other more introductory titles before attempting to read this title. Both Meyer's and York's more introductory texts focus more on building block examples and levels of support offered by the various browsers. "CSS: The Definitive Guide" assumes this foundation is in place and, instead, focuses on the more advanced and, as the title says, definitive discussions of topics Meyer has found to represent points of confusion among content developers.

I have had great luck with numerous volumes in O'Reilly's line of "Topic: The Definitive Guide", and this book continues this string of good luck. While it is not the ideal introductory text on CSS, for reasons cited above, it represents a great second volume - or even first volume for the content developer who already understands the basic principles and does not need building block examples. Numerous sections, especially the very succinct discussions of the CSS Box Model, are by themselves worth the price of the book.

--Doug Hettinger

In a way I'm glad this book contains everything you need to know about CSS.
But in a way I'm sad that everything you need to know about CSS seems to be growing at a phenomenal rate - along with just about everything else tech-related.
Sigh. Job security, I guess.
Anyway, this book, coupled with O'Reilly's "CSS Cookbook", should enable you to do anything you want to your website.
Color would've been nice (ditto for the "CSS Cookbook") but probably would have jacked the price up too high.

I purchased this book with the expectation of being able to implement CSS for a website. The book felt very much textbook-ish, focusing too much on the theory and not enough on practical implementation. I had hoped for more best practices and more on layouts. This book is a great CSS reference but if you're looking for one-stop-shopping for building a CSS web site, you might be better off with something else.

This is an excellent tutorial, and the discussion of the box model in Chapter 7 is alone worth the price of the book. If you think you understand CSS, but you don't understand the box model fully, then you don't really understand CSS. And Eric Meyer does a very good job of walking you slowly through that model. The chapters after chapter 7 fill in that model more completely with additional details that are also indispensable.

However, I think this book should have been called "CSS: A Complete Tutorial," rather than "CSS: The Definitive Guide." This is not laid out in a way that would make it ideal as a reference book.

Overall, this is a sort of book where you won't get an answer to your question without rereading a couple of pages first. Second, the index is quite poor. Basic concepts covered throughout the book don't make their way into the index. Third, while the appendix of CSS properties is useful, a glaring omission is the lack of a browser compatibility chart. Certainly creating such a chart would be difficult, but still necessary (I think) for calling something "The Definitive Guide." Browser compatibility is certainly subject to improve over time, but a baseline list of compatibility at the time of publication would be highly useful, considering that such resources on the web are virtually not to be found. After all, O'Reilly's "Javascript: The Definitive Guide" at least manages to list the standard that defines each portion of the language, whereas the appendix in this book doesn't even do that.

That said, this book has revolutionized my own understanding of CSS, since I read it like a tutorial, and it seems I was badly in need of a tutorial. Consequently, for those who don't understand the true mechanics of CSS, I highly recommend buying and reading this book cover to cover. For those who are well-versed in the underlying mechanics and simply want a reference to the nitty-gritty details, however, this is probably not your answer.

This book proved 2 things to me:
1. Eric Meyer makes as much sense out of CSS as can be made at this point and
2. the days of internet programming being simple and easily learned by all are over.
If you are going to learn CSS I would recommend this book and simple how-to tutorials also. Do this and you will probably join the growing crowd that believes that the whole gang behind CSS and Standards programming should all be tested for ADD and OCD related problems.

I use this book mainly as a reference. The style in which it's written is a bit too 'dry' for me and it would have been nice if the examples had some color... That's why I gave it 4 stars and not 5. As I said it's a very good reference book and I am happy to use it.

I think you need to own this book.

Really, if you're going to take CSS seriously, it's the bible. It covers more ground than any other book and is remarkably clear given its ambitious agenda.

The current edition knows about IE 7, Safari 2, Firefox 2, and all the other recent browsers, plus of course it knows about older browsers and all their weaknesses. Unfortunately, you need to know that sort of stuff too. (How much easier life would be if only all browsers were always 100% standards-compliant!)

One more thing: The publisher, O'Reilly, is a great company. You call them and a helpful person (not a computer) answers the phone. They take care of your customer service concerns quickly, professionally, and in a friendly fashion. That's a nice bonus, but the five-star rating is exclusively for the book.

I've seen graphical guides for CSS and I've seen very complete descriptions of CSS elements, but this book is a great combination of the two. For every styling element mentioned in this book, there is at least one diagram to help understand how it works. This way you can see exactly where the borders of an element are. This book isn't about making things pretty with CSS, in fact all the examples produce very ugly and plain results. The point instead is to show every single CSS element and what happens when you change the attributes of it.

I found this extremely useful for floating elements. There are 9 given situations where blocks are floating in the page. For each example, a supporting diagram shows where the element is put in the code of the page and where it actually will display based on the floating attributes and what other blocks are already on the page.

One thing the book could have used would be browser compatibility references. I know that support for page-break-before/after/inside is sketchy, but perhaps it's just beyond the scope of this book. It's a book about CSS styles and how they interact with each other, but not necessarily when it's safe to use them.

I think you need to own this book.

Really, if you're going to take CSS seriously, it's the bible. It covers more ground than any other book and is remarkably clear given its ambitious agenda.

The current edition knows about IE 7, Safari 2, Firefox 2, and all the other recent browsers, plus of course it knows about older browsers and all their weaknesses. Unfortunately, you need to know that sort of stuff too. (How much easier life would be if only all browsers were always 100% standards-compliant!)

One more thing: The publisher, O'Reilly, is a great company. You call them and a helpful person (not a computer) answers the phone. They take care of your customer service concerns quickly, professionally, and in a friendly fashion. That's a nice bonus, but the five-star rating is exclusively for the book.

This excellent book is easy to read, full of examples, and I have not found one bit of errata yet! The information in here is for persons making web pages. CSS will give you some web design skills that you will actually use!!!

Thus sayeth Patrick Henry. Or so he might have if he were alive today. It seems impossible to learn a new language or become proficient in an old one, without an O'Reilly book on the subject. And the CSS Guide is no exception.

This book is a fantastic reference book for users of all levels. If you don't know CSS, it is a great introduction with easy-to-follow examples that start with very basic concepts. You can start at the beginning of this book and read it through. (In my experience, uncommon for many reference books.) If, however, you are familiar with CSS, you will still find this an extremely useful guide, as it covers in great detail everything you need to know in order to create complex CSS styles.

I thought the book was very accessible, and written in an easy-to-understand tone. My work bought this book as a reference for the developers in our office, and now I'm going to buy it to have a copy at home for my personal web development.

The book's only potential drawback was that I felt the index was a little sparse. I might have enjoyed a more comprehensive index; however, this can be a positive in that when you find an entry in the index you know it is useful because if it is indexed, it is because the topic is well covered on that page.

Great book. It is one of the very best "complete guide[s]" I've ever read.

Reader Review: "CSS: The Definitive Guide" by Eric Meyer

CSS: The Definitive Guide Paperback
by Eric A Meyer

I'm a beginner; just learning and using CSS, and need finite assistance, a resource guide, and a mentor during my learning curve.

As a beginner, I've looked through several books, and in my opinion, I believe "CSS: The Definitive Guide" is exactly that, a definitive guide, but I also believe it deserves the words "Most Excellent" in the title. ;-]

When I received the book I was using Dreamweaver CS2, and in the process of converting older files to xhtml and CSS. I was in a problem solving mode concerning background images not showing in Dreamweaver's (wysiwyg), but the background image were showing in browser tests. Holding the book by the spine with my left hand, I separated the pages with my right hand forefinger and thumb, and it just happened to fall open at the book's approximate midsection, page 255, where one of the subheadings stated "Background Images". Wow! I was impressed at this serendipitous, and fortuitous accidental event.

As I read though a few paragraphs, I noted the examples, looked at the Dreamweaver code and made the changes according to the book. Immediately, Dreamweaver reacted and displayed the page as I had expected it to see it.

This book is not a cover to cover read where you curl up by the fire and read all night, it is a well indexed research support manual -- keep it within reach -- you got a problem w/CSS? -- articulate the problem in your mind, then solve the problem using this book's resources -- checking the adequate table of contents and/or index.

I'm presently involved in several computer projects, but this book keeps calling my name... I like it! I pick it up, open it, read a few paragraphs, and I am seeing and understanding a language that up until now, was just out of my reach. It is fun and rewarding to know I am beginning to understand a new language, CSS, and I am reminded of my 9th grade Spanish teacher who would praise us verbally saying when one of us (students) would read an English sentence then state it correctly in Spanish, "Now you're cooking with gas!" We all wanted, and worked hard to hear that reward, and now as I begin to "speak CSS" I feel that by saying the reward phrase to myself. ;-]

I love it when authors write about the subject, and even though it may be dry, they can offer a bit of humor. I also appreciate those authors who leave their ego out of the dialog, e.g., "now I am going to show you..." UGH!

(CSS) Cascading Style Sheets is of course, the accepted stylesheet language for describing and formatting the presentation of markup language documents, and this book can teach the reader to "read, speak, write and converse in the language."

The book "CSS: The Definitive Guide" goes to the point discussion, defines the point, often in more than one way, explains the principle of the rule, and when necessary shows example code and an illustrative example... what more could you ask? ... Color illustrations maybe ;-] -- Buy the book.

Jerry L Cline, Phx Az

CSS: The Definitive Guide details the ins and outs of the CSS specification. It is filled with numerous easy to follow examples. The illustrations that accompany the examples are invaluable as they allow you to easily compare the markup, the applied style sheets, and the results which greatly enhanced my understanding of the material. The humor included in the examples made me laugh more than once which is a welcome relief when tackling such a complex topic as cascading style sheets.

This edition of the book covers version 2.1 of the CSS specification. The author routinely points out where the specification was unclear as well as how certain browsers violate the spec which really helps point out what style sheet authors need to watch out for when targeting certain browsers. This is information that is not in the specification and could take a lot of time to find out on your own.

If you are wanting to learn all you can about how to enhance the visual presentation of your site, are wanting to learn more about the capabilities of CSS so you can see how to modify the look of sites you visit using reader style sheets, or just want to find out what all of the buzz surround cascading style sheets is about then I'd recommend this book.

I do have to warn you though, the author leaves no corner unturned. He starts out slow with an introduction to cascading style sheets and what they bring to the table. The following chapters then delve head first into topic after topic. You can be sure that you will know the technology through and through by the time you are finished with the book, just be prepared to spend some time working through the material.

The author has done a wonderful job bringing to life a subject that might otherwise be quite dry. The years of experience he shares in chapter after chapter has made me glad that I've added this book to my library.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL. Thus CSS primarily enables the separation of document content written in HTML or a similar markup language from document presentation written in CSS. Thus, this book will be helpful if you are a web designer or document author interested in sophisticated page styling, improved accessibility, and saving time and effort. All you really need before starting the book is a decent knowledge of HTML 4.0, and the book covers everything else you need to know and has lots of examples. This book covers CSS2 and CSS2.1 up through the 11 April 2006 Working Draft. Some CSS3 selectors are also mentioned and covered. I found this to be a pretty good book for someone trying to learn CSS from scratch as well as someone seeking a good up-to-date reference on the subject. Particularly helpful is the Sample HTML 4 Style Sheet in Appendix C. Chapter one makes the case for CSS as bringing order to the chaos that web documents had sunk into by the year 2000, and the rest of the book mentions all of the aspects of CSS that you need to know to use the technology effectively. The following is the table of contents:

Chapter 1. CSS and Documents
Chapter 2. Selectors
Chapter 3. Structure and the Cascade
Chapter 4. Values and Units
Chapter 5. Fonts
Chapter 6. Text Properties
Chapter 7. Basic Visual Formatting
Chapter 8. Padding, Borders, and Margins
Chapter 9. Colors and Backgrounds
Chapter 10. Floating and Positioning
Chapter 11. Table Layout
Chapter 12. Lists and Generated Content
Chapter 13. User Interface Styles
Chapter 14. Non-Screen Media
Appendix A. Property Reference
Appendix B. Selector, Pseudo-Class, and Pseudo-Element Reference
Appendix C. Sample HTML 4 Style Sheet

This book does a great job explaining the ins and outs of CSS. It would be tough to find a better book or a more knowledgeable author. Plenty of thorough explanations; including a handy property reference in the appendix (or you could get the pocket guide by the same author).

It would have been nice if the more visual element descriptions and samples had been in color - shades of gray are nice, but it would be a lot easier to follow in color. Also, some of the figures look a bit dated - not that it takes away from the content.

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When Eric wrote the first edition of this book way back at the turn of the millenium, he proposed to "explain CSS in all its warts and glory." For CSS enthusiasts at the time, that was an advance -- every other author and Web lecturer fixated on the warts!

Six years have changed a lot. CSS, as a tool of modern Web professionals, has moved way beyond its former role as window-dressing for HTML. HTML (and XML) work in partnership with CSS to produce the most logical and yet most flexible page structure that defines current Web document standards.

The book has just about all you need as both a reference and basic how-to. Eric concentrates on the CSS properties and techniques that have real support among browsers. This increases the practical value of the book. Discussion of CSS selectors has been expanded to reflect the growing support for more powerful (and complex!) selector syntax. Most pages have multiple illustrations to clarify text. The book has updated information related to Firefox and IE7.

One disappointment was the sparse coverage of print media styles. Admittedly, browser support of print styling is itself disappointing but a lot of printing is done from the browser and there are still lots of things we can do, as Eric shows in some of his other writings.

Eric's ongoing experience with key real-life Web issues and design knowledge binds the material together and makes this a superior book.
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