CSS: The Definitive Guide | 
 enlarge | Author: Eric Meyer
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Category: Book
List Price: $44.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  27 reviews
Sales Rank: 4310
Format: Illustrated
Media: Paperback
Edition: 3
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 536
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 9 x 7 x 1.3
ISBN: 0596527330
Dewey Decimal Number: 006.7
EAN: 9780596527334
ASIN: 0596527330
Publication Date: November 7, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: All orders ship same business day via standard shipping (USPS Media Mail) if received by 1 PM CST.
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
CSS: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition, provides you with a comprehensive guide to CSS implementation, along with a thorough review of all aspects of CSS 2.1. Updated to cover Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft's vastly improved browser, this new edition includes content on positioning, lists and generated content, table layout, user interface, paged media, and more. Simply put, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a way to separate a document's structure from its presentation. The benefits of this can be quite profound: CSS allows a much richer document appearance than HTML and also saves time -- you can create or change the appearance of an entire document in just one place; and its compact file size makes web pages load quickly. CSS: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition, provides you with a comprehensive guide to CSS implementation, along with a thorough review of all aspects of CSS 2.1. Updated to cover Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft's vastly improved browser, this new edition includes content on positioning, lists and generated content, table layout, user interface, paged media, and more. Author Eric Meyer tackles the subject with passion, exploring in detail each individual CSS property and how it interacts with other properties. You'll not only learn how to avoid common mistakes in interpretation, you also will benefit from the depth and breadth of his experience and his clear and honest style. This is the complete sourcebook on CSS. The 3rd edition contains: Updates to reflect changes in the latest draft version of CSS 2.1 Browser notes updated to reflect changes between IE6 and IE7 Advanced selectors supported in IE7 and other major browsers included A new round of technicaledits by a fresh set of editors Clarifications and corrected errata, including updated URLs of referenced online resources
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| Customer Reviews: Read 22 more reviews...
 This ain't no "definitive guide" September 28, 2008
This book is very far from being a definitive guide to CSS. It's patchy and confusing and contains too few useful examples. It's printed entirely in cheap black and white, hence you have no idea what the colours do, and contains extensive coverage of features which have been removed from CSS over the years - not much use except for historians. The examples it gives are only a limited subset of CSS's possibilities and frankly they are almost all extremely ugly, discouraging the reader from wanting to try out the styles rather than attracting or inspiring him or her.
Further to this, I've repeatedly tried to master aspects of CSS using this book and repeatedly ended up frustrated, because it doesn't contain enough detailed information or illustrations of how the browser will look. It substitutes tedious meditations for factual discussions, and the writing style is turgid and pompous, bordering on the absurd in places - for example the author writes that CSS is "our last best hope" - for crying out loud, it's just a way of marking up HTML pages!
In the end you can probably learn CSS quicker and better from almost any other book than from this, and if you do use this book the information it gives is so patchy that you'll have to resort to a great deal of trial and error anyway.
 Excellent reference August 9, 2008
A real educational experience. Also a well defined book. Be ready to learn when you read this book. This book gets two thumbs up.
Very authoritative and complete April 27, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Before purchasing this book, I had purchased about a half dozen books on css, one from the same author. I was really surprised to find new ways to use css that I hadn't learned in the other books. Each topic is discussed completely and in detail. For a reference on css, this book is the best I've found.
 a little sloppy for a "presentation" CSS book April 1, 2008
4 out of 12 found this review helpful
This is a book about CSS, and CSS, is about the presentation aspect of web pages. How the text appears, the size, the layout, etc.
However, the presentation style inside the book is kind of sloppy. For example, on page 186 and 187, when it talks about inline elements, Figure 7.33 "Strongly emphasized" is printed not as tall as Figure 7.34 and 7.35 when the CSS style is the same. And the word being used is "which is" and is changed to "that is" in Figure 7.34 and 7.35, when it is changing the vertical-align only. The reader would be better helped if they can see the contrast of the CSS style, without the change of wording for no reason at all. Also, in Figure 7.34, the bigger words should not overlap with the smaller words above, as tested in CSS compliant browsers, but it is printed so on the book.
Then again, in Figure 7.36, for no reason at all, the picture is shrunk down to 1/4 size of the previous examples, when they are all talking about the same case except for some vertical-align difference. It may be done just because the page is running out of space. That is pretty sloppy.
On page 181 to 182, it talks about various terms of the inline box model, and there is no figure at all to exemplify the terms at all. Then after the reader goes through a tough time to read through those text of hard definitions, 3 pages later, the figures start to appear. Please, can the book be designed so that the readers are considered? CSS is partly for making the content easy for the audience, and how about this CSS book is made easier for its audience too?
 Excellent Intermediate March 31, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Nicely written, very informative. My deduction of a star is for the reference having neither examples nor page numbers where a more detailed explanation would be found. This is a common omission, so I would still recommend this book. I would not recommend this as a first introduction to web authoring, as it is strictly CSS, which of course does nothing without structural mark-up. For those who have been building sites for a while, and need some guidance and insite into CSS, this is a great choice. However, for those who have very little or no experience I would instead recommend 'Build your website the right way...' by Ian Lloyd.
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