Rating: 
Summary: Good info marred by poor presentation and excessive errata
Review: New Riders publishes nice looking books, but many of them, this one included, suffers from a lack of professional editorial oversight. A book that sells for $45.00 should be proofed a little more closely. The book's companion site lists dozens of editorial errors that should have been caught before the book went to press: http://www.ericmeyeroncss.com/errata.html. After spending this much on a slim paperback volume, the last thing I want to do is spend an hour paging through the book, hand-correcting editorial errors that New Riders' editors should have caught in the first place.Otherwise, Meyer's command of CSS is evident, but this is not the book that it could be. The presentation is hampered by its organization into "projects", and the reader must slog through details of Meyer's application of strategies in his own projects to find ideas that can be used elsewhere. CSS is a great technology, but users are in need of something better organized, better presented, more comprehensive, and less crippled by rampant editorial gaffes.
Rating:
Summary: OK but perhaps it is just the best of a bad lot
Review: Like many others, I bought the book based on on-line raves. I thought it was great at first but now the blush is off the rose. The book IS a more informative and user-friendly intro to CSS than the others I have (many are "look what I made, mommy" books by designers...nice visuals but not the best learning tool). Some of the lessons were a struggle so, fortunately, there were the free tutorials from w3schools.com to help with the rough spots.....never thought of myself as a slow learner until now. Then, just when you think CSS will answer all your prayers, you get seriously gored by the infamous NN4 incompatibilities and then IE problems crop up. What this and every other book lacks is a decent chart reference which shows browser incompatibilities like the great cheat sheet programming cards from visibone.com BUT, I shouldn't have to buy this kind of critical tool, it oughta be a pullout or be in the appendix. Until a better book comes out, prospective buyers should go ahead and get this one PLUS Meyers Programmers Reference (ISBN #0072131780). Round it out the Visibone cheat sheets for quick reference and to keep those nasty NN4 and IE4 nightmares from giving you an ulcer. Between all this stuff and the W3C School site (PS:which also has HTML and CSS validator links and other very cool stuff), even I was able to master CSS...but it takes more books and programmer's aids.
Rating: 
Summary: Perfect introduction to CSS
Review: This book is far from a comprehensive reference guide for CSS (see the O'reilly CSS Definitive Guide - also by Eric - for that), but it is a great step-by-step get-your-feet-wet introduction to the principles of CSS. We use it as part of our training for all of our web interns and employees.
Rating:
Summary: Great CSS - Horrible Designs
Review: I give this book 3 stars, because it does a very good job of explaining and dealing with common issues in CSS. Unfortunately, the designs themselves are on the whole horrible - sorry, it's the only word. It's a shame that the author didn't get some designs from a graphic/web designer to complement what are on the whole excellent explanations of dealing with real world CSS issues, especially as he makes design comments, he's not qualified to make. Have a look at excerpt 10 in the sample pages to get an idea. This is an important issue because one of the powers of CSS is that it can be used to integrate the design and the content in a meaningful and elegant way. On the positive side, often the small pointers that he has for labelling css are particularly good, and I regularly find myself going 'ah, that's so useful'. If your CSS skills are well up to scratch perhaps look at Zeldman's 'Designing with Web Standards' as a possible alternative, but if your still working your way through the CSS in the real world then this is a very useful and practical book and I for one (with 8 years of web-building behind me) find it useful.
Rating: 
Summary: Needs more CSS quick reference content
Review: I recently purchased this book based on the customer reviews I read here on Amazon. I must say that it is a very well-written book, and the author seems extremely knowledgeable about the subject matter. However, I am slightly disappointed that there is not more technical information on how to correctly write Cascading Style Sheets and all the different CSS properties available. Instead, the author leads the reader through several hands-on projects designed to teach the reader how to implement different design techniques using CSS. I would have preferred a little more reference information (maybe an appendix) that allows the reader to use the book as a quick reference when starting a new CSS project or brushing up on some of the technical aspects. The material strikes me as having been written more for someone already very proficient in CSS who simply needs more design ideas, not for somone who is still learning how to implement CSS into a Web site. Nevertheless, it is still a very useful book.
Rating:
Summary: If you like doing exercies!
Review: If you learn by doing the examples, this is the book for you. Clearly written with extensive source code available from the net.
Rating:
Summary: It's the best
Review: If I ever meet Eric Meyer in person, I'll have to drop to my knees and worship him. All of his books are outstanding, but this one is his best. It's not for CSS beginners at all, but if you're basically familiar with CSS and want to learn more practical applications, then this book is for you: - Navigation menus with CSS
- retrofitting existing pages for CSS
- creating printable pages There's something good on every page. I teach Web design and have recommended it to my students. You can't go wrong with Eric Meyer and CSS.
Rating:
Summary: You may have mastered HTML, but HERE's CSS empowerment !
Review: This is a gorgeous, full-color, masterfully laid-out piece of work by an author with cutting-edge understanding of Cascading Style Sheets and willingness to share his fine creative judgement. Yet it may take you a while to convince yourself (as it did me myself) that you need one more Eric Meyer CSS title. The glowing reviews finally broke through my resistance, and my facility with CSS has had several breakthroughs as a result. Like many of you, I already have Eric's two premier titles for guiding web transitions from the difficult world of patched-together HTML solutions to the powerful, systematic, maintenance-friendly potentials of CSS. Here's my experience so you can see if it matches yours. Through insightful and persuasive volumes such as Owen Briggs 'C S S: Separating Content from Presentation' (see reviews at ISBN 1904151043) I finally got that *aha* experience about CSS: These new standards are more than just style sheets, design aids, and download-enhancers; more even than the sum of these: once HTML 4 standards are better followed by browsers, CSS will open up all web-design work in remarkable ways. *HOWEVER*: design life in the meanwhile is extremely frustrating while browsers take their sweet time repairing past imbedded sins. As much as I wanted to break free from old HTML ways, the inconsistencies and vagaries of how browsers render CSS so discouraged me from solving design issues with CSS, that I considered taking a two year sabbatical from design until technology caught up. I thought I was just 'losing it' until I found Eric's own statement right on my desk in 'C S S: The Definitive Guide': "You may notice that, unlike other chapters, almost none of the figures in (the chapter on Positioning objects) was generated with a web browser. This is... a statement about the reliability and consistency of positioning implementations..." What's the average designer to do when even Jeffrey Zeldman admits (in his preface here) that his fallback position in the current world of CSS is *emailing Eric Meyer*? In this volume we see. Eric walks you through common types of design and redesign issues are solvable through CSS (and provides frequent color screen shots displaying exactly what happens after small changes in code). It is refreshing that so much care is taken with both the design and writing of this book. Even the *hints* in margins surprise me - after I thought I had read practically every CSS hint published to date. Eric puts them together in an engaging manner. No matter how skilled you are with design or with HTML, unless your mastery of CSS specifically is on a par with Eric's (all 3 or 4 of you such people), I think that after reading twenty pages of "Eric on CSS" you are likely to feel you wasted valuable time each week since this book's release! Thanks, Eric. Thanks, New Riders for the time and expense to make such a quality volume. Fine work on the companion web site and downloadable code as well!
Rating:
Summary: A Must-Have
Review: If you are interested in learning about CSS, especially its power, you need this book. If you really gotta learn about CSS, you need this book. Of course it will get dog-earred from use and if purchased for a "corporate use" library, you may have to dust off your boxing gloves. I personally refuse to share! Excellent resource. Do yourself a favor and work the examples throughout the book. Once you start with Chapter 1, you'll want to anyway. Usually I start these but don't finish. This one was different. I felt I had to finish -- like a great novel you can't put down until you see "the end".
Rating:
Summary: excellant referance
Review: This is an outsatnding book. Unfortunately it turned me into a css geek for a few weeks and I had to rebuild my company web site from scratch. the flip side is that I now have a full featured e-commerce site with nary an html table in sight.
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