Product Description
Web site design has grown up. Unlike the old days, when designers cobbled together chunky HTML, bandwidth-hogging graphics, and a prayer to make their sites look good, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) now lets your inner designer come out and play. But CSS isn't just a tool to pretty up your site; it's a reliable method for handling all kinds of presentation--from fonts and colors to page layout. "CSS: The Missing Manual" clearly explains this powerful design language and how you can use it to build sparklingly new Web sites or refurbish old sites that are ready for an upgrade. Like their counterparts in print page-layout programs, style sheets allow designers to apply typographic styles, graphic enhancements, and precise layout instructions to elements on a Web page. Unfortunately, due to CSS's complexity and the many challenges of building pages that work in all Web browsers, most Web authors treat CSS as a kind of window-dressing to spruce up the appearance of their sites. Integrating CSS with a site's underlying HTML is hard work, and often frustratingly complicated. As a result many of the most powerful features of CSS are left untapped. With this book, beginners and Web-building veterans alike can learn how to navigate the ins-and-outs of CSS and take complete control over their Web pages' appearance. Author David McFarland (the bestselling author of O'Reilly's "Dreamweaver: The Missing Manual") combines crystal-clear explanations, real-world examples, a dash of humor, and dozens of step-by-step tutorials to show you ways to design sites with CSS that work consistently across browsers. You'll learn how to: Create HTML that's simpler, uses less code, is search-engine friendly, and works well with CSS Style text by changing fonts, colors, font sizes, and adding borders Turn simple HTML links into complex and attractive navigation bars-complete with CSS-only rollover effects that add interactivity to your Web pages Style images to create effective photo galleries and special effects like CSS-based drop shadows Make HTML forms look great without a lot of messy HTML Overcome the most hair-pulling browser bugs so your Web pages work consistently from browser to browser Create complex layouts using CSS, including multi-column designs that don't require using old techniques like HTML tables Style Web pages for printing Unlike competing books, this Missing Manual doesn't assume that everyone in the world only surfs the Web with Microsoft's Internet Explorer; our book provides support for all major Web browsers and is one of the first books to thoroughly document the newly expanded CSS support in IE7, currently in beta release. Want to learn how to turn humdrum Web sites into destinations that will capture viewers and keep them longer? Pick up "CSS: The Missing Manual" and learn the real magic of this tool.
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 Very Good Book for Learning CSS
I found this book to be very good. I usually have a hard time reading an entire book on technical subjects like this, but this one kept my interest. The tutorials are very good and give real world examples. I highly recommend downloading and completing the tutorials. Many times I found myself saying, aha, so that how you do that. I went from practically no knowledge of css to being able to create css based web designs like a pro. Highly recommended.
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Great in depth introduction ( bronstott )
I found this book very helpful. I'm just starting out designing and building web sites, using CSS and Dreamweaver, and this book has been a great help to me.
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 Great book, but... ( fromybookshelf )
First off, I give this book a three, not because I don't think it's worth reading, but because I think there's a big missing part. I'm nearly finished reading it and working through the tutorials. Like everyone else has said, the book is very easy to read and pretty easy to follow. But in order to help readers better understand the skills and concepts, I think the author needs to challenge readers to apply what they learn in sort of workbook format. In completing the tutorials, you're presented with lots of skills and concepts, but unless you're already doing web design on your own, it's challenge to figure how to apply the skills to your own work.
After I complete each tutorial, I would go back and try to further understand what I just did. I have started my own little practice website where I'm trying to apply some of what I learned from the book.
So instead of the author spending pages and pages before each tutorial explaining concepts, it would be better to have readers practice on say a mock site. They could be given instructions for an assignment and then check their work against the finished page in the download. This approach would challenge readers to go back and apply what they learned. Maybe the author could produce some sort of workbook to go along with this book.
Also, I think some of the chapters could be supported with online video tutorials by the author. Again, at times the author presents lots of material and though it's easy to read, it's not always easy to understand.
Other than that, I do suggest working through the book. Also, I would suggest for those readers who are new to CSS, you should definitely do the work in one of the CSS editors that the author suggests in his book. Doing the tutorials in Notepad or TextEdit is not as good as doing them say with TextMate or Dreamweaver.
Finally, I would suggest that if you're new to HTML/CSS, don't start with this book. Start with HeadFirst: HTML and CSS. If I hadn't read that book first, I would have been lost in this one.
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Excellent book, easy to follow tutorials
This is an extremely well-written book that teaches sometimes complex techniques in a way that is easy to follow and understand. What's more, the tutorials actually work the way they're supposed to, without bugs, so you actually get a good learning experience by doing them. I've recommended this book to a number of people, the one person who bought it is going through the book now and loves it.
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Best CSS Book
I've read a few CSS books in the past and haven't been pleased at all. When I tried some of the examples in those books, it hardly ever worked like the book said it would. Most of this was caused by browser incompatibility. Now this book, explains the way things should work and then tells you how to get around some of the browser incompatibilities. And it explains it in plain English. I've been a web developer for 13 years, so some of the things are elementary to me, but it still was worth reading for the way that it explains CSS. I've actually put off learning CSS as I am mostly a ColdFusion programmer and rely on our graphic designers for CSS, but there are those times where you need to understand why CSS is acting the way it does and this book goes a long way in explaining that. It has made my life easier, now maybe I can buy a CSS reference book and know what they are talking about.
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