Rating: 
Summary: Do Not Buy!
Review: This book was in no way worth the money paid. The author does not teach in anyway. Instead he just gives examples of different CSS that he has done in past times. Even the reference page is horrible. Please don't waste your money!
Rating: 
Summary: Good, but better books available
Review: This is not a bad book. And with 100 more pages, diving into some more specifics, it would have been a great book. The writer knows his stuff, but too often he turns aside from getting into details that are essential to really building designs with CSS.
Sometimes this takes the form of skimming over the topic. CSS layouts, while they get 45 or so pages, really require more depth -- especially around real world multi-column layouts. This topic (where, in fairness, the expert knowledge is still being developed) could fill an entire book by itself! And yet, multi-column layouts get less than 30 pages in total.
Another form of short shrift comes in the Formatting Exercises, Appendix A. This could have been a brilliant section of the book. When I started reading it I thought, This could save the book for me. The concept, of changing things slowly, so you see what a particular change will do, is terrific. Alas, too many of the 50 examples are so trivially different from each other that it's not worth having taken the space.
Again, this is not a bad book. It makes a fine addition to a web developer's CSS reference collection -- *after* you get Zeldman's Designing With Web Standards, and Eric Meyer's CSS: The Definitive Guide. (And maybe Meyer's other CSS books, too.)
Rating: 
Summary: Enjoyable and Easy to Understand
Review: Unlike some of the recent reviewers of this book, I found Christopher Schmitt's book very enjoyable and easy to read. I like the way he takes a completely unstyled page and shows you how to take each section and give it some "pizazz." His method's are logical and his results are nice to look at, without being overdone.
People who are heavily into "slicing and dicing" graphics and creating complex table structures may have a hard time with this book, because it puts the *content* first, not the visual effects. But, the future of the living web needs us to get out of that mode and to start thinking about communication of ideas and written content. Schmitt's book does a good job of presenting the information and the appendices in the back of the book are a great resource, too.
My only "quibble" with the book is the large section on SVG which really isn't too helpful, at least not yet. However, before reading this book, I only had a dim idea of what SVG even meant, so I did learn something and will be looking for the advancement of this graphics format in the future.You will also need to read other books on this topic. My recommendations are for Eric Meyer's books (all of them, but especially "Eric Meyer on CSS") and if you use Dreamweaver MX, Project Seven has a wonderful eBook,"Foundations," that is terrific for putting CSS to work while teaching you best practices of working with Dreamweaver.
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