I'm very surprised that no one has mentioned the glaring errors in Chapter 3. A lot of the code does not match many of the names from the downloaded files. The code from pages 52-53 is identical to 50-51 even though it mentions that there are different images. The color they mention doesn't match the images. So far, NOT IMPRESSED!

Love this book!! I use it so much pages are falling out. Great book!

If you are truly new to CSS and not really proficient in HTML, browsers and the like, this is not what you need. The authors will have you think that the book targets a general audience, but this is constantly belied by examples were some elements are not yet defined and, as things grow in complexity, become mere hints rather than the dissections one would expect from an introductory book. If you need more than a concentrated pill of CSS to jog your memory, pick CSS: The Missing Manual instead.

This book is helpful. And i needed it for school so it worked out well =]

OK, so I was a little hesitant to pick up this book despite all the great reviews. It was all the errors that were printed in the book that I was unsure of. Most of these errors were typos but some were errors in the code. If you don't know much about CSS these would be hard to spot.

I decided to get the book, which I am still reading, and decided I should hi-light all the errors in the book so I am aware of these issues and can fix them fast with no problem. I found that the books are now being printed with about 80% of these errors fixed. All the typos are gone, and most of the code has been fixed. There are still some odd typos in it, like on page 41 it reads when it should be Some Text. But their mostly small little details. It looks like some of these errata were found after the seconded pressing with the fixes and didn't make it to print. I would still highly suggest this book to anyone wanting a further push into the CSS world. I use CSS everyday but found a lot of information in this book that I had no idea about.

If you do plan to get it I would suggest running through his errata page (http://www.cssmastery.com/CSSMastery-Errata.pdf) and check for the errors. It may take a few minutes to do it, but it will at least stop you from pulling out your hair when working through the book.

I'm a software developer, not a web designer, so I don't use CSS on a daily basis. I've read a number of CSS books. This is the clearest, most practical presentation that I've run into. CSS is a surprisingly complex topic, particularly when you have to consider the real-world incompatibilities. For an intermediate presentation, this is an extremely well written, impressive book.

This was the first CSS book that I purchased. I was always hesitant to purchase a book on CSS because most of the resources that I've found have been mostly beginner's tutorials or instruction and I felt that I had at least a "beyond beginner's" understanding of CSS. I wouldn't go as far as saying I'm an expert at CSS, but at least mid-level to advanced. However, this book had some previous good recommendations from amazon.com so I bit the bullet and bought it. I must say that I was NOT disappointed!

This book starts off with a very quick introduction/recap of CSS basics including good code structure and organization, validation, DOCTYPES, common selectors including IDs and classes, pseudo-classes, and the advanced selectors such as universal, child, attribute and more, and some wonderful reference on the specificity and inheritance, or the "Cascade", the core of CSS. Although this introduction is provided, it is relatively short at about 25 pages and I would suggest a good working understanding of these basics first, as it will help understand the rest of the book easier as opposed to trying to learn CSS for the first time from this book. The following chapter is another quick 15 pages with on "Visual Formatting Model Recap" including the Box Model and Positioning, two EXTREMELY important concepts to understand CSS properly. Although it is short, it is an extremely powerful section.

Chapter 3 finally jumps head first into the code with "Background Images and Image Replacement." With the movement towards "Web 2.0? websites, one of the most common features you'll see in these websites is rounded corners. These can be difficult to achieve successfully and the authors make it very easy. This chapter also touches on different drop shadows and image replacement techniques, which are useful for placing a logo in place but still having the text remain search engine friendly. Chapter 4 is a fairly short chapter on "Styling Links" with some interesting uses of attribute selectors.

Chapter 5 is all about "Stylig Lists and Creating Nav Bars" including the popular "Sliding Doors" popularized by Douglas Bowman of Stopdesign and first published in October of 2003 in A List Apart online magazine. During the section on creating nav bars, this chapter shows how to use CSS sprites for rollovers and visited links, something which I'll be blogging about soon. Chapter 5 also shows how you can use CSS to create image maps, something I've never even thought of doing with CSS.

The next two chapters are two of the best in the book I think. Chapter 6 deals with "Styling Forms and Data Tables", while Chapter 7 tackles "Layout". I think that styling forms properly can be one of the most difficult things to do in a website Chapter 6 shows some good tips and tricks to handle this properly. After all the chapters on styling elements, comes the final code chapter which deals with Layout and shows how to center designs, create two and three column layouts, and liquid, elastic, and hybrid (elastic-liquid), or fluid, layouts.

As any web designer knows, IE doesn't do the best job of displaying HTML and CSS properly according to the W3C. Fortunately, the last two chapters in the book are about "Hacks and Filters" and "Bugs and Bug Fixing", two excellent chapters for dealing with the countless IE CSS bugs. Finally, the last two chapters of the book are Case Studies that put everything together and take you through building two different web sites in a Web Standards way with CSS.

Overall, this is an excellent book, one I'd highly recommend to any web designer, or CSS developer, looking to expand their knowledge of the powerful language that is CSS. Definitely worth adding to your library. On an additional note, this book is published by Friends of Ed, a fantastic publisher of technical books, and one of my favorites. I currently own 8 books published by "Friends of Ed" and 2 more from their parent company Apress, all of which are excellent books.

This book has some useful information and is really targeted to the hardcore CSSers, who already know the basics (& a little bit more). It outlines clearly many topics and use some good examples (with some minor typos). If you are a beginner, I would not really recommend the book as it may overwhelm you with too technical stuff and exceptions. A good way in learning is not to provide exceptions at the beginning of a learning experience, but more towards the end. But that always happens with folks who know their stuff too well. So, get your basics and foundation right first, know about CSS and THEN go for this publication.

I'm a developer with minimal experience designing web pages "by hand." Most of my work on the front-end includes using built in templates and designers to do the front-end magic for me.

I decided to change all that and picked up this book. In a couple of days I was up and running creating some pretty cool front-end designs...plus, the advice in this book matched almost all the advice I was getting from one of our top front-end guys.

Not a beginner's book and thank god for that - beginners should start online anyway.

If you've been working with CSS for a while but have some nagging questions that never seem to get answered about the tricky stuff like certain layouts and centering, this is the place to go. Andy Budd appears to possess that rare quality that makes for an excellent how-to author which is a deep awareness of just how hard it was to come by his own solutions to CSS issues and focus on those in his book rather than just reiterating stuff you could get from w3schools and peppering it with the occasional tip that's useful.

This book requires that you have some previous CSS knowledge. The first few chapters provide a quick and thorough review of things that you should already know about CSS. The rest of the book is packed full of useful CSS tips. I take Web Coding classes and can say that this book very closely follows the same teachings of professors. I would recommend this book for intermediate level CSS people wanting to hone and advance their understanding of CSS.

The book started out very good by clarifying a few things I missed in Elizabeth Castro's - XHTML & CSS. The author's explanation of the cascade & specificity was not very clear. He only gives you a basic introduction to positioning & fails to truly teach you how to use the CSS positioning properties in an effective manner. My top complaint though is the fact that the case study at http://tuscany.cssmastery.com breaks in IE7 (W T F ?) I would suggest reading Michael Bowers Pro CSS & HTML Design Patterns for a much more informative view of the cascade, specificity & positioning along with code that actually works in projects you may be trying to style up now! That being said - the book does have good sections on commenting your markup, application of filters & hacks & troubleshooting your designs.

Received book almost immediately...enjoyed the contents. So far, this is one of the best books I've read on this subject. I wish i would have read this one first.

This book is solid and informative. The author's writing style is clear and professional. I like it. The book includes discussion of the box model, margins, background images, sliding door techniques, form styling, liquid layouts, rollovers, IE issues, and some cool tricks such as the elastic image. There, the image is styled with percentages instead of pixel measurement. This allows the image to scale with the liquid page layout. Good stuff!

Calling it "CSS Mastery," I expected something more, something jaw-dropping. The dotted leader isn't bad, but I've seen it before. I know from trawling the net that Dave Shea has an article at "A List Apart" called "CSS Sprites: Image Slicing's Kiss of Death" (2004). In it, he demonstrates how to set up a CSS-driven light-up nav panel with different shapes and colors for each button. The technique relies on a bitmap sprite sheet. That trick isn't in here. It should be. It would be great if one of the vaunted CSS gurus (and there are many) would produce a truly advanced CSS book that includes all the wild and visually impressive things one can do with CSS. I had high hopes this would be that book, but no.

So this book is more for people who are new to CSS design, but it is a good book and worth the money. It does include lots of useful information, and I did pick up a few tips. The author elegantly combines ideas I've seen in various other places. Less experienced coders will learn a lot from reading it, but it doesn't offer as much for more advanced CSS designers. Therefore, I give it four stars. Thanks for reading.

This book is solid and informative. The author's writing style is clear and professional. I like it. The book includes discussion of the box model, margins, background images, sliding door techniques, form styling, liquid layouts, rollovers, IE issues, and some cool tricks such as the elastic image. There, the image is styled with percentages instead of pixel measurement. This allows the image to scale with the liquid page layout. Good stuff!

Calling it "CSS Mastery," I expected something more, something jaw-dropping. The dotted leader isn't bad, but I've seen it before. I know from trawling the net that Dave Shea has an article at "A List Apart" called "CSS Sprites: Image Slicing's Kiss of Death" (2004). In it, he demonstrates how to set up a CSS-driven light-up nav panel with different shapes and colors for each button. The technique relies on a bitmap sprite sheet. That trick isn't in here.

So this book is more for people who are new to CSS design, but it is a good book and worth the money. It does include lots of useful information, and I did pick up a few tips. The author elegantly combines ideas I've seen in various other places. Less experienced coders will learn a lot from reading it, but it doesn't offer as much for more advanced CSS designers. Therefore, I give it four stars. Thanks for reading.

I checked this book from the library and find it to be solid and informative. The author's writing style is clear and professional. I like it. The book includes discussion of the box model, margins, background images, sliding door techniques, form styling, liquid layouts, rollovers, IE issues, and some cool tricks such as the elastic image. There, the image is styled with percentages instead of pixel measurement. This allows the image to scale with the liquid page layout. Good stuff!

Everything is solid, and I did pick up a few tips. But this is a meat-and-potatoes book. Calling it "CSS Mastery," I expected something more, something jaw-dropping. The dotted leader isn't bad, but I've seen it before. I know from trawling the net that you can set up a CSS-driven light-up nav panel with different shapes and colors for each button. The technique relies on a bitmap sprite sheet. That trick isn't in here. Too bad.

So, it seems the book is geared more for beginners, but it is a good book. It is worth the money, especially if you are new to CSS design. It does include lots of good and useful information. The author elegantly combines ideas I've seen in various other places. Less experienced coders will learn a lot from reading it, but it doesn't offer as much for more advanced CSS designers. Therefore, I give it four stars. Thanks for reading.

This book is well written, a breeze to read from cover to cover. It is laid out well, with a logical progression of topics. And it cleared up many misconceptions I personally had with how to use CSS. Unfortunately, CSS references on the internet often use bad techniques due to a misunderstanding of what some key declarations mean. In my attempts to emulate some of these techniques, I frequently found myself having to make large amounts of change for browser compatibility, etc. This book has shifted my perspective on how things should work. Since then, my time spent fine tuning has been minimal.

I would highly recommend it to anyone who was self taught and having troubles getting things to work like desired. Great for beginners up to intermediate too. I think anyone who is truly advanced in CSS will be familiar with most of what is covered, but maybe not bad as a reference.

This book was in a sense life changing for me. It helped lay the foundation for my understanding of CSS and ultimately led me to a job in web development. The writing is very accessible and easy to read. I highly recommend it for anyone who is starting out with web standards.

If I were to recommend one professional level book on CSS, this is it. It offers real world solutions that work across browsers and that are fully standards compliant. Explanations are clear. Examples are well chosen and described and I've found solutions for head scratching problems that actually work.

This is probably not the first CSS book that a web designer should buy. Take the "Advanced" part of the title seriously. But if you have your HTML and chops and a basic understanding of CSS, it definitely belongs on your bookshelf. Or if you're like me, it will be handy on your desk with coffee stains on the cover. It's my first choice reference for anything CSS related.

If you're completely new to CSS or even if you've been working with it for quite some time but haven't quite mastered properly laying out your site with pure CSS, this book will change your [web design] life!

To summarize, this book took me from "still partially relying on tables for layout" to "completely free of table-based-design"

very helpful if you already have a basic knowledge of css. lots of great tips and tricks for the aspiring web master.

The book is well written
It gives an insight into the relationships between CSS & DOM
On reading this book you gain a full and balanced insight into the rational and practical uses of CSS

I heard that this book was for "Advanced CSS Programmers" a while back, so I didn't get it. However, I got it a couple weeks ago because since then I picked up a basic understanding of CSS. I'm half way through the book, and I just want beginners to know that you should get this books first. It's a great introduction, and everything is so well organized. The code is all explained with great detail. This is going to be a very valuable source for me for years to come. Get it!

I would recommend this book to anyone that isn't already a CSS guru, like Andy himself and the other authors. And maybe even those expert users would find something useful in the book.
It's very well written and organized. And it's a must have to any serious web developer.

Every page of this book has useful information. It is not thick, but has a lot info about CSS, and how different browsers understand (display) it. I use this book at work and I am very satisfied (unlike some other books I bought).

This resource proved most useful to me when needing to lead the redesign of my company's health care site. Accessibility was not our past strength ironically. I was hired to solve the issues, and this resource made it largely possible. Amazing depth of coverage, smart solutions for developing future design workflow methods... The power of CSS can be monumental IF a designer can produce the proper mark-up to best accommodate future changes and our users' access to clean pages. This book will help you apply this idea. Thank you Andy Budd.

This book is very designer-friendly. It is hard to find technical manuals that speak in plain enough English that less technical people can still find useful -- this book does just that. CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions

Andy Budd is one of the leading web designers, and this book will provide plenty of information for any designer. This is a resource that I go back to from time to time, and it always seems to answer my questions.

This is a must for any web designer. There are so many clever tricks in here, information about how IE and FireFox interpret css differently (and how to work with that) and ways around bugs in popular browsers. Not for beginners, but the best advanced css book I've found.

I'm a big fan of Eric Meyer's CSS books and used to recommend one of them to CSS neophytes. Now I'm recommending "CSS Mastery."

The trick with CSS is getting the core concepts mentally cemented in place. "CSS Mastery" is well-written, well-organized and extremely clear. That makes it approachable and that means what you read will stick.

"CSS Mastery" is not a CSS reference manual. For that, turn to Meyer's "Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide." But make "CSS Mastery" your first purchase.

This was my eighth CSS book. I wish it had been my first.

CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions by Andy Budd, Cameron Mall & Simon Collison is great book to take you beyond the basics CSS. Their tips and suggestions will save hours of experimenting and give you and understanding of why things work.

I had originally thumbed through this book, subtitled "Advanced Web Standard Solutions" in my local bookstore and shrugged it off as covering pretty much most of what I'd already digested from other popular CSS books. It wasn't until a friend showed me some cool techniques from the book that I properly read though it and regretted not buying it sooner!

Though it's aimed at the intermediate web designer, it is well written and I would certainly recommend this as an essential buy for all web designers. The book begins with Clear:Left's Andy Budd provides most of the content starting with a chapter about well-structured and meaningful mark-up. It's these best practices that will help catapult you into the realms of CSS Master! It then recaps on the box model, positioning and floats, making it easy for a beginner to pick up this book and run with it, before moving into the techniques, with clear and concise examples, including a couple of good chapters on bugs and hacks.

The final two chapters are where Simon Collison & Cameron Moll step in to demonstrate these examples in two real-world showcase websites. This book is absolutely the best book currently on offer for CSS web design.

I am a quick-fix guy. If I run into a problem with my website I look for the 1st script, code, or hack that best fits my problem, then customize it accordingly. Andy is a professional. He is less concerned about the quick-fix than he is about proper code usage and browser compatiblity on a long-term scale. If you are very concerned about the latter, browser compatibility, then this book is for you.

However, be aware, this book was published prior to the release of Internet Explorer 7. So although Andy goes indepth about the compatibility quirks of IE 6 he fails to cover IE 7. The good news is that IE 7 seems to have patched up some of those IE 6 quirks, so if you take Andy's advice and use the standards compliant CSS then you should have no problem adapting your website to more and more standards compliant browsers.

This book also gives some previews of yet-to-be-released CSS 3 as well as proper HTML and XHTML use.

Finally, as an amateur CSS programmer, I felt, before I read this book, that I was not utilizing CSS to its max. My stylesheets were limited to simple layout and typography tags. This book fully explained professional techniques that truly harness the power of CSS.

I found this book to be really helpful, mainly because of its clarity and simplicity. I've yet to do the 2 Case Studies included, but I intend to because reading this book has shown me that you can only master this information by doing it. Andy Budd, Simon Collison, et al, do a great job of giving you good examples to implement.

While this book has not (nor any other source, so far) answered all of my questions in one fell swoop, it has given me a much clearer overall understanding of what I'm dealing with, allowing me to come up with better questions and strategies for solving problems that come up in making a web page work across popular browsers. I highly recommend it.

Ever tried to tame a 'stubborn' page; Where an element seems to have a mind of its own? If yes, then, Welcome to CSS Mastery.

Do you depend on Javascript to do routine formatting and menu mapping stuff? You need CSS Mastery

Need an effective common set of css methods that work on most browsers? Buy this book and you won't regret it.

Think you still need tables to help with page layouts? Read this book and think again.

Of all the good stuff I see in this book, the most intriguing for me is that HTML can actually be elegant and clean. This is mainly because Andy hand-holds you along a path of logical brevity to 'HTML-reborn': A place where HTML is allowed to do just its originally intended work of semantic markup; Where CSS controls layout and style in an inherently factorable, inheritable and maintainable way.

And hey! Make sure you read Chapters 4,5 and 7, especially.

Ever tried to tame a 'stubborn' page; Where an element seems to have a mind of its own? If yes, then, Welcome to CSS Mastery.

Do you depend on Javascript to do routine formatting and menu mapping stuff? You need CSS Mastery

Need an effective common set of css methods that work on most browsers? Buy this book and you won't regret it.

Think you still need tables to help with page layouts? Read this book and think again.

Of all the good stuff I see in this book, the most intriguing for me is that HTML can actually be elegant and clean. This is mainly because Andy hand-holds you along a path of logical brevity to 'HTML-reborn': A place where HTML is allowed to do just its originally intended work of semantic markup; Where CSS controls layout and style in an inherently factorable, inheritable and maintainable way.

I have read a few css books, not all but few. For now I can only say this is the best book I've read about CSS and generaly computers. Now I'm reading pro css techniques and that book is not nearly good as css mastery even though some people say that this books are almost same.
If you want to learn modern and advanced css on easy way this should be your first choice.

There are just so many positive things that I have to say about this book I'm not quite sure where to begin. First, I really wish I came across this book last year when I began learning about designing Websites with standards based CSS and HTML.

In that time, I spent countless hours on all kinds of different reference and CSS group sites reading articles and copying suggested fixes and CSS solutions. I accumulated a dozen authoritative links, some with handfuls of links themselves, to reference CSS solutions, fixes to particular quirks and of course hacks and filters. However, amidst the sea of information you still really end up experimenting yourself to determine the particular merit of one solution to another... all of which adds up to a pretty high learning curve which is why some experienced veteran designers still use tables to some extent for layouts.

However, with this book. Andy Budd lends an authoritative, straightforward and experienced voice to the elements, quirks and challenges that you'll face as a CSS designer. Plus he steps you through the solutions without weighing you down with unnecessary technical discussions and jargon. Here is a problem, here is a damn good solution. Some other reviewers have gone more indepth about this book and many suggest only intermediate level designers should use it but even as a beginner you should have this in your collection.

Else, you'll find yourself like me in hindsight wishing you had it a long time ago.

There is a review from 2006 that says this book has a huge errata file. The first printing had some errors, but they have all been fixed in the later printings.

Overall the book is truly exceptional. Up-to-the-minute CSS info presented in a very readable way.

I would say this is a great book--both if you are new at or more experienced in CSS.

I'm a jack of all trades freelance developer. I buy a lot of computer-related
books. I'm usually disappointed. But not with this one.
This book not only has the straight scoop on css positioning I was looking
for (plus backward compatibility tricks for IE6)
it is also well written and easy to read.
I don't see how this book could be given anything less than the top possible
rating.

This is a great and very helpful book.
open your eyes on right way of CSS design

this book will make you grand master of css

As a long time user of CSS, I figured I would pick up a few gems from reading CSS Mastery. I was dumbfounded when it seemed to lift the wool from my eyes and shake up the way I analyzed CSS related tasks. Andy Budd is a CSS god and proves it with his clear and concise examples and explanations. Anyone that works with CSS on a regular basis is doing themselves a disservice by not reading CSS Mastery.

This is actually the FIRST promgramming-related book i've ever purchased from my own free will. As a programmer and graphic designer, everything I have learnt with CSS has been self-taught from all the great tutorials and CSS sites plastered over the web.
Now, I am a pretty good CSS developer, but upon opening the first chapter I knew straight away, this book will sharpen my skills more than what i thought possible. I thought to myself intially, I hope this isn't a book written by a bunch of old, boring people who don't have a clue about cutting edge techinques with web 2.0 (i know, i know, it's only a term) and that they wouldnt cover things like CSS hacks, workarounds, etc.
Oh was I wrong. This book is written by people who are the behind the cutting edge designs we are inspired by today and cover topics from the box model to hacks and workarounds commonly practised today.
I can't go into too much detail because believe me, there is too much to cover. But seriously, CSS Mastery is one helluva book. I gave it an easy 5.

I bought this book just looking for some tips on things to do and not do with my CSS, and for that purpose, it delivered perfectly. The pages are filled with useful bits that cover basic and pretty advanced topics in CSS. Best of all, there are a lot of snippets with useful hacks to make code work cross-browser.

If you are a self-taught web developer/designer, I would definately recommend this book.

This is a great book if you need to know more than just the basics of CSS. It gives you a lot of inspiration and tips in order to improve your existing CSS knowledge. You'll probably want to try all the examples on your own website and see how small things can improve your user's experience.
A must have if you're planning to move your "so-so" website to a "bling-bling" website.

I LOOOOVE the fact that this book is STRAIGHT TO THE POINT! It's only 244 pages but with NO FLUFF!

This book deals with CSS techniques and try to address common CSS problems that a developer could encounter. As it is indicated in the title, this book is not recommended for beginners as there are some difficult topics that can be hard to tackle without a solid understanding of CSS.

"CSS Mastery" is a fast-paced, hands-on, nuts-and-bolts workbook for web design standardistas. The book is worth buying for Chapter 2 alone, "Visual Formatting Model Recap", where you'll no doubt find yourself often enough while wrestling with CSS positioning oddities. A chapter on table styling is welcome as well, as tables have their place in web design yet are often given short shrift in CSS books.

This book is not meant to dazzle with sweet design inspiration (get Andy Clarke's Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design (Voices That Matter) for that!)--but you'll find solid techniques and plenty of them. The included case studies will help you to understand and develop a good workflow as well.

This book is a well-crafted and valuable tool which should be in every web designer's toolkit.

A brief but concise book that covers everything you need to know to build an effective web standards CSS site. Lots of examples that can be extended to suit your own needs. If you only get one CSS book, this is probably the one you need.

I've read several CSS books, most of them thick, dry tomes.

This book is relatively small (254 pages, including index) and easy to read. But more importantly, it's clearly written. The author has a real talent for getting across concepts that other authors make difficult.

Moreover, the book is filled with very practical, useful tricks that you can use to enhance your sites, while increasing your knowledge of CSS.

This is not a start-from-scratch "learn CSS" book, but if you already know the basics, I *highly recommend* this book.