CSS: The Definitive Guide

Customer Reviews

Average Customer Review




Boring, just like a good web dev reference should be, November 21, 2008
By Joshua Cunningham
A solid plot, well-formed characters, and an intriguing writing style make this... wait, what?

This is a boring, very useful book. I've read a lot about CSS on the web and nothing came close to the explanation in this book. Instead of saying things like "we won't bother you with the complex way this is calculated," Meyer bothers you with the complexity. Each property I read made me really understand how it works and how it should be used.

I've been reading this bad-boy from cover to cover and I think I'm doing myself a bit of a disservice. I think I'm going to skip to the positioning section (everyone could use a better understanding of this mysterious and magical world), read that, maybe read a few other things I'm interested in mastering and then leave it as a reference. It makes a lot more sense to read the properties you don't understand than trying to get through it all.

Learn (x)HTML and CSS online, then buy this book if you're serious about getting into web page design.



An expert who has trouble writing clearly, October 14, 2008
By Jack Harich (Atlanta, GA USA)
I feel obliged to review this book after being unable to accomplish a simple css task: designing an improved css file.

Meyers knows his subject. But he keeps using fancy examples or unnecessarily complex coverage that detracts from the content non-experts need to learn. For example, I was attempting to figure out why a certain case of inheritance is failing. His section on that is too complex to follow, because he covers the entire inheritance resolution scheme of css, rather than the simple cases that most frequently appear. So I was never able to solve the problem. I had to resort to searching the net.

After reading the first few chapters, I needed to go back and find where he discussed first-child. Skimming did not find it, so I checked the index. It's not there! So I was forced again to search the net.

This could have been resolved by writing clearly. Every time you introduce something of importance, bold it or put it in a section heading. Then skimming will allow finding it easily.

At this point I decided the book was not quite worthy of sitting on the same shelf as my dozens of other web dev books, and so I tossed it in the trash. Your mileage may vary, but for me it's a time waster.



This ain't no "definitive guide", September 28, 2008
By Pen Name (Ibaraki, Japan)
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
By Robert J. Rieck
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
By Mitchel J. Haas (Midwest USA)
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.