Rating: 
Summary: Part good, Mostly Bad
Review: I bought the book hoping to find everything I needed to know about CSS 1 & 2. What I got was not exactly what I expected. The book is very informative on compatibility issues between at least 3 of the major browsers. This part was well done and I have no complaints with that.What I do have a problem with is the fact that the whole book, every example for every property, was completely embedded into the HTML itself. Their was a slight reference to externally described CSS but no examples to follow. The idea of the sheets is to set a number of parameters for most or all of your pages to follow. Embedding them into the HTML every time defeats the purpose. Also their were some mentions to multiple options techniques that never had any kind of example or visual of any kind to follow so you can see how this could be useful. In that sense the beginner user would be completely lost on something that can be helpful down the road. After going through the entire book and learning maybe 5% more than I already knew (from online free tutorial sites) I realized that it would better to just go online and search the free sites if I have any questions. Their are tons of people out there who can answer your questions a lot better than this book can. It wasn't a complete waste, but certainly not worth the money I paid for it. Not a good learning tool, hardly a reference guide. If your new to this you might just want to go else where to learn it. If you're a veteran believe me when I say that you'll be bored before you make it through the first 3-4 chapters.
Rating: 
Summary: Anyone wants it?
Review: I bought this book because the review spoke about a "pragmatic and practical" approach, and "how CSS actually works in current major browsers". The reality is that this book lists the properties (I can have that from the W3C web site) and rates a property "safe", "unsafe" or "partial" - but almost no explanation what the implementation of this property actually causes in what browser. Vital information for the real world use of CSS is non-existent, not even caveats that certain properties, when applied to certain elements, can cause certain browsers to crash. In my opinion, this book is useless. Anyone wants it?
Rating: 
Summary: I have already found several things I can use in my work.
Review: I have been working with web page and web design for several years, in fact I have and am teaching a course in HTML. Part of the course is an overview of CSS, and I found this book and the inofmration was simply great. The book not only covers CSS1 and 2 but also CSS3, which is something no other book I have seen has done. In fact this book also gives you a deeper understanding of how CSS is impleneted in several browsers, including Opera, IE and Netscape. Over 800 pages are filled with infomration that breaks down CSS creation in an understandable set of concepts. The author has put together a reference manaul that everyone who creates style sheets should take a look at. You have over 40 pages on fonts and font properties, as well as 90 pages on text properties. The book even covers transistions and filters, another topic that is lightly covered in other books I ahve read. There were topics I have never heard of before like RUBY tags, and some visual effects that are covered as well in this manual. There is even a CCS1 to CSS2 comparison chart included so you can see how they are simliar and different. Overall if you plan to use CSS in your web design, than this book may certainly be the book to have.
Rating: 
Summary: The most solid CSS reference I have seen yet
Review: I love this book. Each CSS 1, 2 and proposed CSS 3 property is listed along with examples, browser support or lack thereof, and then goes on to detail exactly what bits are not supported. This book belongs on every designer/developer's shelf and will be valid for a long time.
Rating:
Summary: Second edition a better book
Review: I reviewed the first edition and gave it low marks for being a pedestrian attempt which did not convey the controversies and attractions of CSS. The new edition is better organized and is up to date with information on actual browser implementations -- and includes the IE extensions, a touchy but valuable subject often avoided by others.
Rating:
Summary: Awesome book
Review: I was looking for a good book on CSS and this was the one. Not only does it explain all of the concepts behind both CSS1 and CSS2 but it also gives in-depth information about each of the elements in both of them. Even though CSS2 is not currently accepted, I am looking forward to using it in the future and I won't even need to buy another book because this one thoroughly explains CSS2 also.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Reference
Review: I wouldn't use this book to learn CSS, but people who are familiar with it and need a reference should definitely consider this book. Not only are all the elements explained, but browser compatibility information is provided for each of them.
Rating:
Summary: Worthless to the core
Review: If all of the information in this book was re-written to exclude all of the redundant and worthless muck, it could have easily fit onto 50 pages. As it is, the author managed to strech it into eight HUNDRED pages. Greenpeace should be all over this guy for the monumental waste of trees.
There *is* informative information, but you really have to dig to get to it. The entire text is truly an excersize in copy and pasting. The table of contents alone is over twenty pages. The index (which is really what we use) is only ten pages. A good example of the amazing bloat in this book are the pages on "padding". The primary properties are padding, padding-left, padding-right, padding-top, padding-bottom. Any sensible author would have given a comprehensive description of one of the properties, and then breifly stated the obvious difference between left and right. However, two pages are dedicated to each property. Each two-page description is virtually identical to each other, substituting "right" for "left" where appropriate, etc.
Since it's been on my shelf, I've gone to it occasionally for quick reference, and it's painfully difficult to find anything specific. Far better references can be found on the web for free.
Rating: 
Summary: Adequate reference volume - probably not a starting point
Review: Just a few notes about the SECOND edition (of which the publisher was kind enough to send me a review copy): Judging from descriptions by reviewers of the first edition, this seems to be a considerably enhanced second edition, addressing complaints described here. The book is easy to look through and use as a reference. The preface describes the target audiences as already "web authors" who want to become more effective. If you are completely new to CSS, the book does a nice step-by-step education of the ins and outs of CSS. However, if it had been my first CSS book (instead of 6th), I'm not sure that I would have had the motivation to learn how to convert all my planning from simple HTML markup to CSS; that I got most persuasively from Owen Briggs' "Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content from Presentation" ISBN 1904151043, which I highly recommend to anyone still just mixing CSS into their HTML for occasional convenience. Nor is the writing engaging enough to carry along a reader who is not already convinced that they have GOT to learn CSS. "Core CSS" does provide pretty comprehensive reference material, although some of it will not become "pragmatic"(the stated objective) for a few years -- e.g., all the material on CSS-3. The author usually includes the caveat "proposed" before the term CSS-3 ( the standards are still developing). Three years from now when browsers start to attend to CSS-3 standards, this material will apply (or be outdated if final standards different). Anyway, for CSS newcomers the inclusion of all the not-yet-applicable CSS-3 material will probably be more confusing and distracting than useful. More "pragmatic" to me would have been the inclusion in the extensive browser-compatibility tables of Apple's Safari browser (i.e., Mac OS X). Safari's user base is closing in on 10 million; it is the fastest and arguably most convenient browser yet designed; and although Mac users are a minority, their ranks include above-average incomes (and hence web shopping, etc.) and a preponderance of designers (including web). My other concern about attempting to present "Core CSS" as an all-in-one CSS is that it does NOT have examples of how to WORK AROUND the documented quirks introduced by the pervasive disregard by browser designers for CSS standards. Here is where ANY CSS designer needs to study a copy of Eric Meyer's "Eric Meyer on CSS: Mastering the Language of Web Design." The latter volume enables a designer to see how/why to employ CSS from scratch in designing pages/sites and special strategies for REdesigning to maximize efficiency for author and visitors. I'm not one to encourage monopolies, yet I must say to the beginner that once Meyer's volume has given you the strategies to design with CSS, Meyer's reference volume (0072131780 - Cascading Style Sheets 2.0: Programmer's Reference) continues to be handier to work with as a daily-basis reference than "Core CSS" - even including basic conceptual frameworks such as the "box model" in a way that helps your planning (despite being two years older). Although "Core CSS" includes some screen shots, they do not offer as strong a conceptual underpinning for beginning one's work with CSS. My apologies to the publisher for a tepid review of Core CSS: it is improved over the first edition; but it doesn't amount to either an effective introduction for beginners or a comprehensive 2004 reference for the experienced.
Rating:
Summary: Very Good Intermediate-level Reference Guide
Review: Last week, my employer told me to redesign several online html templates used to provide product documentation to customers. The new design needs to use html today, but be ready to support XML in the future. I decided that css style sheets were the way to go, but I know little about how to implement them. I am not a programmer -- just a "power-amateur." I needed help. My local Barnes and Noble had one book in the whole MonsterStore about css -- It was "Core CSS." I bought it because I needed it immediately.
"Core CSS" turned out to be a well-written, well-organized, thorough, nearly-error-free book, which surprised me. It also answered several small questions I had, which made it worth buying -- but it would have been very difficult to use, if I hadn't had some experience with web programming already.
"Core CSS" lacks four things: 1) a really, really good introductory chapter that shows me exactly what css is and how it is used on an html page, 2) some really good two-page examples of "best-practice" css stylesheet implementations ( I am baffled that the book lacks this), 3)a MUCH better discussion of inheritance -- when, why and HOW to do it, and 4)a separate chapter on web page design basics using css.
Still, I was surprised at how good this book really is. It manages to very clearly and painlessly summarize a hash of difficult W3C/Microsoft/Netscape/GodKnowsWho Specifications, and provides the most consciencious reference to browser support that I could have hoped for -- and that's important, given the state of browser support and the complete obliviousness of Employers who ask "power-user" employees to support everything their customers use. This is a fine, useful book. I expect the Third Edition to be a classic.
| 
