Strengths:
The greatest strength of this particular book is its thoroughness. Everything you might want to know about Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is in this book. There are great sections which explain how CSS works, particularly the idea behind inheritance, how the cascade actually works, and which tags in the CSS take priority when rendering the web page. There are some great sections, too, on how to troubleshoot when strange things happen because of style contradictions.
Each chapter is nicely divided into logical sections with a helpful tutorial at the end of each chapter to actually walk you through, hands-on, what you've just learned. There are lots of pictures, illustrations, and tables of information to help you better understand how CSS works in a web page.
The book has some sidebars with valuable information like "Gem in the Rough" that calls attention to concepts or tricks of the trade that are often overlooked. The sidebar called "Up to Speed" offers explanations of technical terms or concepts relevant to web design. There are also sidebars called "Frequently Asked Questions" and "Power User Tips" that offer the information that their titles suggest.
There is even a robust appendix of the actual CSS style attributes and their ranges of values.
Weaknesses:
The main weakness of this book is also its main strength. There's just too much information here for anyone trying to get up to speed with CSS. CSS and HTML are not complicated. They are very simple scripting languages that are easy to learn — there are no complex syntaxes involved. The tags and attributes are suggestive of what they do, so it's very easy to memorize and become an expert fairly quickly.
A 477 page book is intimidating. Anyone trying to get up to speed on CSS will shy away from it if this is the only resource they consider. I don't have the time or the desire to read every word in a book like this. A lot of the material is redundant. There was one place in the book where the author repeated the exact same material in adjacent paragraphs. At first I thought it might have been a publishing error, but the context around the material was different. Maybe the authors are forced to create filler to make these books appear as though they are worth the $35?
What I really want in a desktop reference are some easy-to-understand tutorials and an easy-to-use index of properties and their values. I want this book to sit on my desk where I can reach for it and quickly find a property or value whenever I need to. The appendix in this book is confusing because everything is presented in paragraphs, not in easy-to-scan-and-use indexes like one might expect.
There are also some major oversights. Nowhere on the cover of the book do the words "Cascading Style Sheets" appear. I guess the authors just assumed I am to know what CSS means.
I have issues with the actual design of the book. Often, the sections in each chapter begin in the middle of the page so it's difficult to locate a particular section when you need it. There are labels in the upper outside corner of each page with a description of the section it appears in, the intent being that you can easily thumb through the book and find the section you're looking for. But the tags are small, with white text on a dark grey background, and they are positioned horizontally, making them almost worthless.
The same is true of the side bars. While some of the information is good, some of it is pointless. (Why does a book on CSS want to tell me how to get free photos online?) The design of the sidebars is bad, too. White, thin text on dark grey backgrounds is very difficult to read and if the information is worthy of the attention a sidebar demands, then it should be easy-to-read — and highly relevant.
Summary or Comments:
I can't recommend this book to anyone starting to learn CSS. While the information is thorough, the design and presentation are poor enough to cause me to look elsewhere for a good reference book. This book could have been half its size at half its price and still offered more than enough info to become very proficient in CSS. But most valuable of all would have been a usable appendix of properties and values.
Flip through whatever book you are considering; investigate how well organized it is and whether or not it has a good index of properties and values so you can get to what you need easily and quickly. Then buy that book, not this one.
