Core CSS: Cascading Style Sheets [Paperback]

The one thing I like about this book over the O'Reilly book on the same subject is that it dives a lot into CSS2, giving me a head's up on features to come. Neat.

Somebody else commented about the lack of info on external style sheets. That's a dumb comment because you can only learn how to write an external style sheet if you know the individual bits of code used. And the book *does* mention how to use external style sheets -- but most of the examples are inline, which is easier to illustrate.

Thumbs up on this book!

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.

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.