Rating: 
Summary: Excellent into and reference
Review: This is truly an excellent resource for webdesigners stuck in the dark, old HTML 4 days. The book is clearly organized, well indexed, and easy to read. While largely written in a textbook style, there are bits of humor that do not slow down the flow at all.Along with covering all CSS1 & CSS2 elements, Schengili-Roberts also previews the CSS3 specs, which should get you excited about the day when browsers decide to support it. Highly, highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Good for teaching and as a reference
Review: When you've gone down the long road of learning HTML, then some kind of programming, then XML, you eventually look back and see how things have changed. Once you appreciate how XHTML can really separate content from presentation (and you know how valuable that is after using XML), it becomes clear that you need to know CSS. Core CSS goes through everything, and it does it very thoroughly, even on properties that are essentially repeats of each other (i.e., margin-left and margin-right). The basic core concepts regarding the box model, floating and such are all well covered with examples, and each property throughout the book tells you exactly what the "gotchas" are in the various browsers out there. The frustration that might come from design using div tags and CSS can at least be directed toward the browser makers and not the standard itself. The only minor shortcoming, not worthy enough of dropping my five-star score, is a rather brief example of doing a "table" with div tags. Still, it's not enough to really sweat over. I keep the book on my desk all of the time when doing layout and design. You will too after you breeze relatively quickly through its thousand pages.
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