tag. After reading this book I have defiantly changed my mind.This book will get you thinking about CSS and give some good background and examples on why its the way Web Designers SHOULD be designing their sites. Its excellent reading to clear your senses on what CSS can offer and get your creative ideas flying.
If you know nothing or very little about CSS this will give you the necessary background, and skills to start writing your first styles. Approach this book as a primer, and you will get the most out of it.
It's about time inferior Web Practices that penalizes your users instead of rewarding them went the way of the Dodo.
Rating: 
Summary: Poorly written and confusing
Review: I bought this book because of Christopher Schmitt's high reputation, and because I'd heard so many positive reports about it. Christopher Schmitt does have a good sense of design, and he uses CSS in an imaginative way, but he's no writer or teacher. The book would be more aptly renamed "Random Thoughts about Web Design". The first two chapters burble on about design principles - important issues, but others have written about the subject far more cogently. Then a chapter about style rules that is likely to confuse the hell out of anyone not already well-versed in CSS. After a few designs, you're then plunged into the mysteries of handling PNG and SVG with CSS. (Yes, those graphics formats that are not supported by the vast majority of browsers in current use.) And where are the basic rules about creating borders, styling text, and other useful things? In an appendix, that's where. Unless Christopher Schmitt can get a better editor to knock some sense of coherence into his thoughts, he should stick to design, and stay well clear of writing. Sorry, this is one of the worst computer books I've read in a long time.
Rating: 
Summary: explaining CSS web pages
Review: I finally got CSS web pages explained. The book begins with an overview of html web pages and folds in the information about CSS web pages in a way that even a beginner can follow. I thought it was GREAT. The humorous style of the author helps to make a "rather dry subject" intersting. I would love the author to tackle other technical subjects.
Rating: 
Summary: Makes CSS "Click"
Review: I had picked up several other CSS books that were basically CSS Language References. I got the impression that CSS was basically a more complicated way to accomplish what "font" and similar tags already did. Who needs that? Turns out, I was doing CSS all wrong and just making my life harder.
This book, however, was the first book I read that really showed how CSS is supposed to be done to make your web design life easier. In the middle of reading this book, it suddenly "clicked" in my head... Mr. Schmitt shows how you can take a plain vanilla page with no formatting whatsoever and turn it into a beautiful layout and design using CSS -- and then reformat it with a few keystrokes. The most valuable parts of the book are the ones in which he demonstrates how to mark up various portions of a page using structural div tags, and then format those portions with CSS style sheets. And there are pages and pages of samples at the end of the book that basically show you how duplicate things you see in printed brochures and ads.
I've read some of the negative comments from other reviewers, and in my opinion, what they are complaining about is CSS itself -- this stuff is really HARD to learn to do well! But this book is a very good place to begin. It's not the only book you'll need on the subject, but it'll train you to think of CSS in the right way and get you ready to use those CSS language reference books effectively.
Get this book first.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent indroduction to CSS layout
Review: I highly recommend this book to anyone just starting CSS layout. It provides a clear strategy for practical application of the subject and is very well written. I don't understand the negative criticism from the reader from Ohio -- this book plus the code samples are how I learned CSS layout very quickly.
Rating:
Summary: Nice, useful tool
Review: I like this book because it goes beyond the hands on and examples (of which there are plenty) and beyond the technical how-and-why-it-works stuff (which is made easy to understand here). It starts with a discussion of how and why to determine what your site needs to do and who it needs to target before you get down to the design elements. Are you selling something or providing information? Two different approaches, two entirely different styles. Helping to make that determination before plunging right into the hands-on stuff is more useful to me than many of the other how-to books I've looked over. I design and manage three websites of my own and right now they're a pain to maintain. Thanks to "Designing CSS Web Pages," they won't be that way much longer.
Rating: 
Summary: Poorly written and edited book
Review: I was drawn to this book because of a line that appeared inside the front cover: 'Designing CSS Web Pages came about because the material available for web builders to use CSS always seemed to be knee-deep in geek speak that produced only superficial design enhancements." I have neither the time nor interest to purchase those 1200 page doorstops, so I bought this book in the hopes that it would impart the essence of CSS quickly and clearly, focusing on the practical over the theoretical.
Well, I ended up returning the book to the bookstore because it was so poorly written and edited. The author's knowledge is clearly advanced, but I needed to read each page six or seven times to grasp even the simplest concepts. Clearly he's lived in the trenches and has a lot of nice advice to help us all avoid common problems, but I rarely understood what he was saying! Then he'd move on so quickly.
For example, he'd have this to say about Cascading guidelines:
"Cascade Guideline #1: in the media type (screen, printer, and so on), look for all the declarations for an element and property. The style is rendered if the selector and element match."
Huh? And that's all he would say about that. No example and no clarification of brand new terms (what's a "selector"). And the number of typos throughout the book are too numerous to mention.
(Epilogue: I sent this review to New Riders and they bent over backwards to restore my confidence in them. They immediately sent me a free copy of Eric Meyer's new book on CSS which was wonderful. I was very impressed with the way they handled it.)
Rating:
Summary: Poorly written, low on content
Review: I wish I'd paid more attention to the negative reviews of this book because I am very disappointed in it. To begin with, this book is poorly written ("Like I mentioned earlier..." for gosh sakes!), poorly edited and full of errors.
As for what the book is *not*:
- It is not a good introduction to CSS.
- It is not a good explanation of why to adopt CSS. (Zeldman's Designing with Web Standards is infinitely better.)
- It is not a good resource for best practices and dealing with real-world shortcomings in the implementation of CSS. (Among others, Zeldman is much better on that too.)
- It is not a good source of CSS examples. The examples in the book are trivial and pooly explained. There are better examples on lots of free CSS sites and Meyer's Eric Meyer on CSS is a much better book.
Rating:
Summary: The ideal choice for visual designers
Review: I'm a graphic designer and have gathered some solid background in web design through the years.
The moment I saw Christopher's tutorial "Web Page Reconstruction with CSS" [the website] on Digital Web Magazine mentioning the upcoming book, I immediately knew that this was the book for me.
It turned out to be an eye-opening experience starting with the structured content and moving towards the "styled" end result purely with the implementation of css. I have looked at several other books on css and while many of them provided valuable in-depth knowledge none of them created a spark for me like "Designing CSS Web Pages" did. Like no other author Christopher shows in simple examples how CSS can be used to actually work on the look of pages, accompanied by the underlying code. That makes it the perfect companion for the visual designers out there.
Even the so-called appendix has a lot to offer: the 50 formatting exercises show you how to create variations of a headline followed by a paragraph: headlines separated by various line styles, headlines left-, right- and centre-aligned, headlines residing in their own, coloured box tucked into the text block, headlines spiced up by background images... you name it!
I admit, as others have mentioned, that some chapters require an understanding of other, related techniques like JavaScript, so the book would not seem an ideal choice for beginners. However the examples are clearly presented to be as comprehensive as possible and certainly sparked my interest to deepen my knowledge where it was lacking.
For those that have a basic background the book opens up a bunch of new possibilities - it really is that good.
Rating:
Summary: Save Your Money
Review: I've been working in the computer business since 1984 and can honestly say this is the worst computer book I have ever seen. As you all know this is really saying something, as there are multitudes of poorly written book in our industry. The prose of this book approaches childishness at times. More to the point, the book is poorly edited with numerous errors and mistakes throughout. Many of the errors are inconsistencies between progressive code examples that often extend to the associated text. A full chapter is dedicated to technologies that are not yet available to any browsers. The book is simply not ready for publication. Save your money. I wish I could get mine back from Mr. Bezos.
