CSS: The Missing Manual

• #3 in Best Cascading Style Sheets Books

63 Reviews

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Consider this a "getting started the right way with HTML and CSS" book. As such, it does a marvelous job.

I had a chance to get this beginner's book -- even though my bosses have been grossly overpaying me for years if I really were a beginner! Too many beginner books tend to over-simplify, which becomes a barrier to the more complex issues that a serious beginner will meet down the line. That is not the case here.

Step by step (sometimes even telling you what and when to click!) the book will take you through the basics of creating stylesheets for HTML. You will move from text format basics to moderately advanced layout issues and even print media stylesheets.

The text of the book itself is formatted in an interesting way that is easy to read and makes points clear. There are lots of images and diagrams. I liked the way many of the illustrations jutted out into the outer margin. The effect was a vivid enhancement and the book is bound in a way that lets it sit flat, making it easier to read while keying.

The author also performs a service by introducing, when appropriate, advanced issues and controversies that will surely interest the type of person motivated to go on in this field. The book includes appendices with a CSS Property Reference; CSS in Dreamweaver; and extended CSS Resources.
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A few months ago, I got Head First HTML. Reading it motivated me to update all of the web sites I maintain. This book will likely motivate me to update the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) I use in my web pages. Between the informal writing style and the great step by step tutorials, this book makes learning about CSS quite painless and in fact fun. Whether it's formatting text, creating margins and borders, adding graphics, site navigation or formatting tables, there's a wealth of information here. I used to think CSS was something somehow scary and too difficult to learn. And now I instead realize it's a way to make web sites look awesome without having to resort to JavaScript, Perl or any other web site language (although clearly they can be beneficial too).

The book also contains reference material in the book's appendices, including a CSS Property Reference and online CSS Resources. This book does an excellent job in describing a "web language" every web designer (both pro and amateur) should know.

The problem with many of the CSS books that I have read is that most of them just reiterate the CSS specification. While this is useful knowledge, it doesn't cover what you need to know to build robust web applications that work consistently across the myriad of browsers on the internet.

This book covers the usual stuff with CSS: styles, precedence rules (the cascade), text and fonts, padding and spacing, the box model, positioning, tables, etc. It also goes into detail about how to apply this knowledge.

Some of the stuff that is included:
- building tabs with the Sliding Doors technique
- Entire chapter related to IE6 and how it diverges from the spec, and work-arounds (aka hacks) that can be used to correct these problems. Other browsers such as Opera and Safari are also covered throughout the book.
- Entire chapter related to floats and using these to create column-based layous. Work-arounds to problems and unexpected behavior are also covered.
- Entire chapter related to forms and how to use CSS for layout

The book is well edited and contains some really good graphics to explain the layout and positioning. Each chapter has a tutorial to help you work through the techniques.

I bought this book along with Eric Meyer's book CSS: The Definitive Guide. I started reading Eric's book first and got through the first 1.5 chapters. I'll write a review of that book later. However, I wanted to get a bit more immediate knowledge, and that's where this book comes in. While it's content is mostly excellent, there were a few glaring problems with the book. Having said that, it's still an excellent read on the subject and therefore, comes highly recommended.

As I have already said, the content is mostly excellent. That means that there are some things the author says that I do not agree with. For one, the author seems (and I emphazise seems) to recommend using the HTML transitional DTDs. I would disagree. I know the author's point for mentioning these DTD is so that those websites that have traditional HTML 4.0/4.01 out there wouldn't have to be reformatted immediately if the DTD were changed to a strict type when one goes to update the site, however, I--like Eric Meyer--would stress that any new pages (or sites, for that matter) would be better off to use the Strict XHTML 1.0 (or 1.1) DTD right from the get-go. The things the transitional DTD's allow will eventually be phased out and is generally considered not good web design.

Here is one thing the author wrote I would never tell a beginner in CSS or HTML:

"Technically, you should place all the @import lines before any CSS rules, as shown here, but it's okay if you forget. Web browsers are supposed to ignore any style sheets you import after a CSS rule, but all current Web browsers ignore that restriction." (page 34)

First, I'm not sure that Firefox 2.0 ignores that restriction, nor Opera at whatever version it's at. Regardless, I would never count on the fact that a browser ignores a CSS implementation detail, even if we're talking about IE; afterall, browsers are updated all the time (at least, now with IE7.. ;) ) and are constantly adding greater and stricter support for CSS.

Besides those two examples of "technical" detail (which, in my opinion, don't make this book any less valuable), there is one thing that really annoyed me which is why I rated it 4 stars instead of 5--grammar.

The grammar is mostly excellent, but there is one aspect that you'll find annoying if you speak English as a first language: the author's use of contractions. For example:

"The headline's now massive in size." (page 36)

"To a browser, any tag's a box with something inside it--..." (page 133)

"Things get ever weirder when one element's inside another element." (page 138)

There are many more examples in between page 36 and page 133, and I'm sure more follow page 138 (as far as I've gotten in the book so far), but this really annoyed me. The apostrophe-s contraction is mainly used as a shortcut for " is" for only a few English words, like it (it's) or that (that's). But when used like the author has used it, it becomes very hard to tell what's meant to be a contraction and what's meant to be a possessive. The editor of this book should really have caught this improper usage of apostrophe-s and removed all the extraneous contractions, as it's really a huge distraction while reading this text.

Other than that, the book is technically very well written, just don't take everything as gold. This book will bring you up to speed quickly if you are a beginner to immediate HTML/CSS coder/designer. For a more thorough discussion of CSS and what particular browsers support which aspect of CSS and how, read Eric Meyer's CSS: The Definitive Guide published by O,Reilly. That book is more technical than practical (but still practical) whereas this one is more practical than technical. Eric Meyer's book is a lot more fun to read than the actual CSS spec itself (believe me, I've read the spec...boring...and confusing.).

If you want to get up to speed quickly, get this book. But also get Eric's book for the nitty-gritty details once you're up to speed.

I've read and reviewed a number of books on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and I've learned something from them all. But for whatever reason, this one showed up at just the right time and has me inspired and motivated on a new project... CSS: The Missing Manual by David Sawyer McFarland.

Contents:
Part 1 - CSS Basics: Rethinking HTML for CSS; Creating Styles and Style Sheets; Selector Basics - Identifying What to Style; Saving Time with Inheritance; Managing Multiple Styles - The Cascade
Part 2 - Applied CSS: Formatting Text; Margins, Padding, and Borders; Adding Graphics to Web Pages; Sprucing Up Your Site's Navigation; Formatting Tables and Forms
Part 3 - CSS Page Layout: Building Float-Based Layouts; Positioning Elements on a Web Page
Part 4 - Advanced CSS: CSS for the Printed Page; Improving Your CSS Habits
Part 5 - Appendixes: CSS Property Reference; CSS in Dreamweaver 8; CSS Resources; Index

From the newbie perspective, this book works well. The first part of the book lays out the case for using CSS instead of pure HTML to format your pages and gain control of the style. It takes a subject that can be a bit intimidating and makes it very approachable. From there, you get a section on how exactly CSS works. This is much easier to digest than some of the more formal reference manuals I've seen in the past, and there's not as much focus on the minutia of every little variant that can happen. This is the material you'll use 95% of the time. Part 3 is where I started to get excited. I've been doing CSS for a while now, but over time I've built up designs that "work" but that could be done much better with what I've learned of late. I noticed a number of items that I want to try out on a new project I'm about to start, and I have a feeling that I'll be in a much better situation style-wise on this application than any of the other ones I support. Same with part 4 and the chapter on improving your CSS habits. I was/am guilty of a number of these things, and this information will go a long way towards making me a better CSS junkie (and will make anyone following after me much happier in terms of support).

I think what worked so well for me here was the consistent use of a single "site" for examples and illustrations. The CosmoFarmer site gave the information a thread to hang on to throughout the chapters, and progressions were logical. I appreciated the tutorials at the end of the chapter so that you could try out the new skills. But what I *really* liked were the references to other sites where you could get more information, as well as clarification on what browsers don't do things according to specs, and how to work around these bugs.

Armed with this book, a newbie would be able to become competent in CSS. And if you've been doing CSS for awhile, there's a strong chance that McFarland will deliver some nuggets that will take you to the next level. I know that'll be the situation in my case...

I started builing my own site early this year with Dreamweaver 8 and "Missing Manual: Dreamweaver 8" helps me a lot. After a while, I find it very difficult to maintain and change with all those "table formating" and I decided to change to pure XHTML with CSS.

After spending months of time on looking at numbers of web sites and books. I can now recommand you to do following (if you are new to XHTML and XSS):-

(1) Read "First Head HTML with CSS and XHTML (you will then know all the basic, with fun); and

(2) Read "Missing Manuel: CSS" (you will then able to build your site as good as the best that you can found).

Enjoy.

A couple of months back I learned the Powers That Be wanted my website's backend to look just as snazzy as the front end. Which makes about as much sense as wallpapering one's fuse box, but hey, what Viacom wants, Viacom gets. And they wanted the backend redone in CSS. With the website's regular programmers fully occupied with recoding a bunch of other stuff, it was left up to me (as the website's Jack of All Trades) to do the actual redesign. And I didn't know the first thing about CSS.

So up to the bookstore I went, and when I came home I had: Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference (Dynamic Html); CSS: The Definitive Guide; and CSS: The Missing Manual. Although the first two books have been helpful, I couldn't have done all that I have done in the past couple of months without the third.

I have ADHD. Simply reading a book like this isn't easy. I usually have to try and apply the stuff before anything sinks in. But that wasn't the case with this book. As I read through it, all the little pieces seem to just fit together, and I found myself thinking, "Oh... so THAT's how you do it. Neat!" on several occasions. After four chapters I felt that I had learned enough to do most of what needed to be done. And I had.

My website's backend looks great now. Couldn't have done it without this book.

There are some really good things in here, The examples are good, the code samples are good the descriptions of the different properties is good.

As a reference it is bad. The only way I can use it as a reference is to have read it all the way through and remember that it covered what I'm interested in and find that chapter.

This book could of been written with half the amount of paper and been much better, each example has painfully long instructions.
e.g.
Move the cursor down two line then type "foo:blue"
hit enter
type "bar:red"
it should now read
foo:blue
bar:red


I don't mind books doing this in the first chapter by the 13th it gets bad.

After searching online and experiencing countless CSS tutorials, I have to say that this book ranks at the absolute top for learning CSS. From the straight-forward examples to the "easy reading" writing style, I have really enjoyed adding to my newbie knowledge of CSS.

If you're tired of trying CSS tutorials that leave you more confused afterwards than you were going in, stop the madness and invest in this manual. I am only half way through the tutorials and, already, this author has cleared up so many things that I hadn't been able to quite grasp before.

You simply cannot go wrong with this one.

From the first page, I found the book to be extremely readable and accessible.

Although I am not new to web development or CSS as I've had to deal with these topics, I wanted to learn CSS from a beginner level. For a semi-beginner, this was the perfect book for me because I know some CSS, but I needed someone to show me the basics and lay a good foundation to learn the advanced topics so I don't repeat mistakes that I may have picked up. The tutorials and expert advice that David Sawyer McFarland gives in the books, especially on multi browser (especially Internet Explorer) hacks is invaluable. It feels like I have a CSS guru mentoring me as I learn the basics who drops expert insight at exactly the right time.

The tutorials are great and the book is very visual so you can see the difference that CSS makes with before and after pictures.

Another thing that I really like about the book is that the author provides links to web design resources appropriate for whatever topic is being discussed. This means, that for a CSS beginner, I don't have to spend a lot of time building up my list of websites that I hit up for knowledge and resources.

This book is not a reference manual for CSS, but if it were, I probably wouldn't enjoy reading this book as much as I do.

This book really delivers at teaching me CSS from the ground up and also succeeds at being my CSS mentor in producing a clean attractive CSS web site with tons of expert tips, tricks, and resources.

Highly recommended!!

I'm not a neophyte with CSS, but when I needed to turn an all-table-layout site into an all-CSS-layout site, I needed help. I turned to McFarland's book, which after a quick flip-through at the store seemed to hit exactly what I needed. Literally two pages of reading covered me, and I was off and running. But when I started reading the rest I was amazed at how much I didn't know about CSS. I really appreciate the real-world focus on browsers like IE5-6, and the inclusion of specific fixes for those CSS-unfriendly browsers. The fact that this book is SO recent - mid-2006 - means it's as up-to-date as a printed publication possible could be. While I'm sure the lengthy tutorials would be useful for someone progressively learning CSS, I like the book for it's logical organization, allowing me to flip to the bit I need, quickly see examples of what's going on (the ample screen shots are appropriate for a visual medium like CSS), and get back to work. I don't buy many computer books (for all that I've written several), but this one earns a permanent place not on my bookshelf, but right on my desk.

This book is well written and fun to read. Even though it probably wasn't necessary, I found myself reading it from cover to cover. With what I learned from this book, I went from "kind of knowing CSS" to "really knowing CSS" - I feel like a semi-expert on the subject now.

One drawback for me was the emphasis on using downloaded CSS samples - I prefer books which are designed to be read without using your computer at every step of the way. I'm sure this is a good way to learn, but I ended up skimming over most of the tutorial sections and just reading the "meat" of the book.

Still, I'm rating it as five stars because it was very helpful for me, and I'm sure these tutorials would be helpful to some people (just not me).

I started doing websites back in the mid-90s and finally stopped sulking and started to really use CSS. There hasn't been one thing I wanted to do that I couldn't easily figure out from this book.

I have wasted so much money over the years on useless computer books that this has been a joy. I've done a fair bit of technical writing over the years, so I recognize the skill and hard work behind McFarland's clear and simple language. Buy this book!

I read this book as part of the 2006-2007 Jolt Awards sponsored by Dr. Dobb's Journal. This was an especially good book for me since I am not a web design person, and I was a real newbie to CSS. But this book got me really involved because McFarland makes CSS and all of its nuances so interesting. It's a technical book, but it's also just a great book: the presentation is logical, lucid and the topics incrementally build on each other. McFarland went to great effort to explain thoroughly each concept in text and graphical examples, and not to produce just another CSS reference manual. This is a book that is almost effortless to read. It gave me the best explanations of the foundational CSS Box Model and of "the Cascade" that I have read. Want to know how to us negative margins, in-line block displays, and when to actually use tables? They are all here. The only disappointment I have with the entire book is that the screenshots are in black and white, obviously a cost-saving decision. But I got used to it after a few chapters. If you are learning or working with CSS you will prize McFarland's tips on fixing the CSS bugs in all the major browsers, including the priceless litany of IE HTML hacks he offers up in each chapter. Don't miss this gem: it's a cover-to-cover read, and it won a well-deserved Jolt Productivity Award in the Technical Books category.

This is one of those rare gems of a reference guide that manages to build a solid foundation and go from there to a comprehensive and detailed guide to CSS.

The author does not cut any corners: the first part of the book establishes the philosophy of using CSS versus plain old HTML, along with laying down the necessary (and often overlooked) information (ie: the right docType to use, how inheritance really works, how multiple CSS files play with each other, etc.)

All this preliminary information is followed by a well-organized exploration of CSS. The second part deals more with text and margins and more formal methods of formatting content, as well as using CSS to spice up site navigation without sacrificing standards. I appreciate the author's discussions on the different opinions on em's versus pixels, not to mention his easy to read prose. All in all, the book presents the true meat of CSS to users in the second part.

The third part of the book is devoted to layout and positioning. It is here that the user will discover the ins and outs of floating elements and how to use them. This has always been a weak area of mine so this was very helpful.

The book ends with information on good practices for CSS. I am as guilty as the next guy in that more often than not my stylesheet is a mess of ill defined classes and elements. This section is for that.

This book is for both beginners and experienced code monkeys. Beginners with benefit from the meticulous and careful pace off the book while experienced users will most likely find one or two clever tidbits to add to their repertoire.

Do you need to take the pain out of Web Design? If you do, then this book is for you. Author David Sawyer McFarland, has done an outstanding job of writing a book that lets your inner designer come out and play.

McFarland, begins by showing you how to create style sheets and provides an overview of key CSS concepts, like inheritance, selectors and the cascade. Then, the author takes you into the real world of Web design. Next, he helps you with one of the most confusing , but most rewarding , aspects of CSS: controlling the placement of elements on a page. Finally, he shows you how to make web pages look good when printed.

If you're new to HTML, with this most excellent book, you'll learn all about page-building basics in a CSS--friendly way. More importantly, this book shows you how to tweak your CSS so it plays well with any browser it meets.

In my business, I have a constant need to learn new technologies, protocols and methodologies. It's a never-ending need and, fortunately from my perspective, enjoyable much of the time.

What makes it enjoyable are learning aids like "CSS: The Missing Manual".

Author McFarland takes the reader step-by-step through CSS from the very basics through a moderately high level of understanding. He does it in small, amply illustrated examples that are clear and relatively free of errors. (McFarland does maintain a website where examples and errata may be downloaded.)

McFarland's style is very clear and he doesn't find a need to resort to the stupid humor found in too many books explaining technology.

Overall, a great little teaching aid and a credit to the Missing Manuals series.

Jerry

I have to give this book a partial rating. Although I give it a 3 star, and the reasonings for that, is because the book is thurough in its teachings. The step by step instruction is very good, how he guides you through the steps and processes. The downside of this book, and many books out there that teach this subject, is that it teaches you how to do premade work. When you want to venture out on your own, is where you get confused. You learn how to do someone elses work, set it up, code it, where to place it. What these books need to do, is teach you how to do YOUR own work. To tell you to grab your OWN graphics, work with them, place them, whatnot. THAT is what good teaching is about. Teaching others how to do YOUR work, is not the way to get people to actually LEARN the product.

That is the only downfall to these kinds of books and in the future, good authors such as David Sawyer McFarland, as he clearly knows his subject, should teach people how to learn with their own work, as each layout is different, and is coded differently. Not ALL setups of CSS is going to work with how he teaches it, with his form of design. Which is pretty much, pretty basic to begin with. If maybe he taught more people how to do their own work, step by step, these books would be more worth the money. Then taking out hours of hard earned time learning someone elses work and not know what to do with your own once you completed it.

To someone who really wants to learn the subjects, books like this are a waste of time. I would rather spend time looking up freebie tutorials who will teach you how to code your OWN work, than spend fifty dollars on books that will teach you the opposite.

This book is fun, well-written, and practical. As a programmer, I've avoided fully learning CSS for a few years now. The design side of things doesn't interest me that much and I've been able to get by using Dreamweaver. This book will even impress the coders. There are some excellent design patterns that can be used in a variety of typical web-based apps. The focus of this book is on writing simple, clean, and well organized CSS, which is something every programmer can appreciate.

Fantastic book for learning CSS!
Here is the order that I suggest to learn XHTML/CSS styling:
1. Head First HTML/CSS
2. CSS The Missing Manual
3. CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions
So far, I have really enjoyed the first two books, when I finish CSS the Missing Manual, I will move on to number 3.
I have found that these three books ideally complement each other.

Visuals:
The book has an attractive layout. The pages have comfortable margins for any notes you may wish to add, page numbers and chapter titles are quickly accessible on every page. Additionally each page has a box in the upper outside corner describing the contents of that page, allowing for easy browsing. Screenshots are clearly printed.

Readability:
Personally I use this book more as a reference tool. The writing style might allow for a cover to cover type read, although personally the topic wouldn't hold my interest. The author tries to include various design tips in the text, but overall the coverage feels a little basic.

Practicality:
If you are completely new to the concept of CSS, this book might be a good match for you.

I would say one of the weak points of the book is that it is not a very exhaustive consideration of available CSS properties. For example, the book only mentions the inline, block & none options for the display property. Instead of listing the other options, it simply says "The display property has a myriad of possible options, most of which aren't supported in today's browsers". I could understand not explaining every single CSS property option in detail, but at least provide a list of possible options - it's not that much more ink. So in that respect it's not the best book to serve as a reference.

It is handy on occasion to have an illustration visually explain the effect of a CSS property.

Audience:
According to the introduction, the book "is designed to help readers at every technical level."

It's hard to be all things to all people. You can't really write a Professional CSS For Dummies book. The introduction continues to explain that the book is generally for advanced-beginners to intermediate users, while an "advanced Web page jockey" might be interested in occasional tips and tricks scattered throughout the book.

I think this book would be best suited for beginners..

Overall:
Not bad. For the beginner it will provide you a good introduction to the topic.

I have purchased many CSS books and have been either talked down to or put to sleep by them. This one takes you step-by-step in an extremely intelligent yet accessible style. Even though I knew the initial material regarding the basic CSS language, I found it was so well written here that it was a pleasure to re-read it.
The use of Tutorials is essential in learning CSS and Mr. McFarland's are presented via partial downloads and then having the reader write the CSS code. Of course the complete pages are also available for comparison.
The author acknowledges Internet Exploder (sic) and it's buggy CSS implementation and presents the necessary hacks to overcome it but doesn't fall into the trap of endlessly providing workaround code instruction for obsolete browsers.
This book has just the right balance of embracing Firefox and IE 7, whilst still providing for IE 6 and even 5.
Well done!

I have been designing web sites for about 4 yrs now and CSS was totally new to me. I bought this book to better understand CSS and I was amazed with how helpful the book is. It tells you pretty much everything you need to know about CSS. I would recommend this book for any web designer or someone who wants to learn how to built web sites.

Cascading style sheets are the heart of some of the most popular web sites but getting them to work with HTML can be frustrating. That's why CSS: THE MISSING MANUAL is so important a pick: it provides an introduction to both HTML and CSS interactions, offering up an experienced web designer's strategies for overcoming obstacles and finding the heart of CSS strengths and options. Over a hundred pages of tutorial exercises offer a real-world opportunity to see how tested web pages work and how to implement advanced functions. A top pick.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

Overall, the book is a great read and recommended for anyone serious about designing professional websites. The chapters are broken up appropriately giving readers a gradual progression into the world of Cascading Style Sheets without too much detail at once. A major issue encountered in the book were the random passages scattered throughout where the author made recommendations that subsequent sections was boring and could be skipped. Personally I feel this puts the reader into a disgruntled state of mind. I liked how David put in the tutorials at the end of each chapter (except chapter 1) and these helped a lot clarify the material and how to put that material to use. I was disappointed though that the book did not present exercises for the reader to try out on their own at the end of each chapter. There were some exercises given by David but they were not consistent throughout the book (most chapters didn't have them). Finally I really enjoyed the overall pace of the book and found Appendix A with the entire CSS property list to be most helpful.

This book is the best CSS book I have ever read. I have learned more in this book then the other 4 books I have on CSS. I like the way he walks you thru each lesson and has you key the code and then tells you in detail what that code is going to do. My favorite part is when he teaches how to get around all the browser defaults as well as the way to fix all the Internet Explorer bugs.

This book has tutorials for every chapter and there is a website that you get two versions of each tutorial. One for you to work on and one that is finished so you can see how it is suppose to look like.

If you want to learn CSS without struggling, this is the book.

I've never written a review on Amazon, but I just had to after going through this book. It's very clearly written and goes through some very complicated coding. I needed to brush up on CSS and found that I learned a lot. I went through the book from the beginning to the end and found it very clear and logical. Sometimes they went over similar points more than once, browser bugs, for instance, but I found that helpful because they were items that needed to be drummed into my head! The book also has a lot of references to other sources of information. There are many great websites out there on CSS that I never knew about. So you're not just getting one book, you're getting tons of reference material in this book.

Great book! Up to date. Found something useful on almost every page. Easy to understand explanations. Tutorials and examples to reinforce learning.

I'm recently returned to the world of web design. This book was able to clearly and concisely explain the concepts in a way that no other book out there has been able to do for me.

After reading this book I was able to assemble a small website with clean CSS and was able to impress someone with more CSS and web design experience than me.

The most valuable thing about this book is that it contains the many common problems (along with answers) that most web designers face when trying to design for Internet Explorer as well as more standards compliant browsers.

For those who want to get their heads around CSS, this is for you.

I looked at all the current CSS books in the store before choosing this one. It got me up to CSS speed in no time. It's definitely one of the nicest, cleanest and best put together technical books I've seen in a very long time. Nice layout, accurate info and very easy to read. I love it. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

This is another fine addition to the Missing Manual series. CSS is easier than it sounds and now I think I understand it. MacFarland makes it all clear. This whole series is excellent - books for those of us who still like our manuals on paper.

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.

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.

McFarland's book has filled in a lot of missing pieces for me, and a lot of his illustrations have clarified what I have had trouble visualizing from other sources. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this book for beginners or intermediate CSS users who want a clearer understanding to take the design process to the next level.

I've been messing around with CSS for a while, but because of some missing details in other sources, I'm using what I've learned to format page elements within tables, never having totally grasped CSS layout concepts, particularly floats. I'm only half way through the book now and have a much clearer understanding of how to solve previous problems.

In addition to being an easy read, the hands-on tutorials have been very helpful. And I love that he's included the hacks to make CSS work in even IE browsers. Many other resources provide only links to websites where you can scrounge around for tutorials.

McFarland provides plenty of links too, but includes important explanations and hacks that keep you from having to roam the web looking for basic explanations that should be included in an instructional manual.

If you've been struggling with some of CSS's quirks, this book could provide missing information that will allow you to move ahead more quickly. I've had a lot of "Aha!" moments as an advanced beginner and am looking forward to many more.

In addition to being a good source of instruction, the book also covers some advanced CSS topics including media style sheets and tips on improving CSS habits. There are three appendices: a CSS Property Reference; using CSS in Dreamweaver 8, and about 7 pages of links to additional information, examples, and advanced tips and tricks.

"CSS: The Missing Manual" was a money very well spent for me.

Sunny Carney

This book is a great and authoritative guide to CSS programming. It's easy to read and has good examples and tutorials that makes a sometimes-complex "language" easy to understand. The bugs in various implementations are discussed with frankness and confidence that gives the reader less intimidation about workarounds. I found this a fantastic guide, and well conceived and executed.

I own several "Missing Manual" guides, and impressed with how they read appropriate to most any level of existing experience or skill, unlike some of the "Dummies & Idiots" guides, which seem to only be an appetizer to another, better guide when you need to further your knowledge.

This book is by far the best book out there if you want to learn Dreamweaver CS3. Not only does the author show you important features of the program, he explains web design concepts and principles. This is the best $30 I've ever spent. Thank you David for such a great book.

You should write every book for all of Adobe's products.

This book is definitely a must have for web designers (or people like me who are learning web design). A friend of mine referred me to this book and I absolutely love it. It is very straight-forward reading and includes tutorials at the end of each section to reiterate what you have learned. The Missing Manual series is an excellent way to get you going on many different topics... for CSS, this manual is great even if you have very little experience with HTML.

Buy this book... It is well worth the cost. You will not be disappointed!

Great introduction into the world of CSS. Having designed web pages in HTML since the 90's I'm way overdue to make the transition to CSS. This book has been absolutely easy to follow with great examples that cater to both beginners and more advanced users. I highly recommend this book even if you know next to nothing about HTML...it's a great place to start.

As a technical manager for the past 23 years, I have purchased probably several dozen O'Reilly-published technical books. "CSS: The Missing Manual" is the first one that I have read cover-to-cover, followed all the tutorials, and then continued to reference the book later.

I needed help starting to learn and getting up to speed quickly with CSS, and this book was recommended to me. McFarland's combination of easy-to-read writing style, detailed and educational tutorials, and his occasional humor made this book fun and interesting. After I finished this book (over a few weeks), I felt comfortable enough with CSS to go further, experiment, and update many of my prior html-only web sites to CSS-based (and create a couple new ones).

I'd definitely recommend this book for folks who already have some familiarity with html but now like me need to go further and learn the intricacies of CSS. (And it was helpful to me that I was using Adobe DreamWeaver CS3 as my web site editing software). Great job by the author.

Very good introduction to css and I just agree with all the other reviews. However, as hard as I tried I realized that there was not solution to liquid layout. The theory is great and David explanation misleads you into believing that it is feasible. But then looking at the css files on his site I realize that he himself does not really use liquid layouts. So why not just come out and say: this is the theory, but really it does not work, here is the very complicated work around. Would really avoid a lot of frustration in the readers.

I came to this book having a very basic knowledge of website design, html and CSS. I had already designed and uploaded a site using tables for layout with some styling using CSS.
The limitations of table-based layouts and the advantages of CSS are so obvious that I decided that my next site would use CSS for layout as well as styling, so I bought CSS The Missing Manual.
This book has taken me to the next level in a painless and dare I say it.... almost enjoyable way.
Why is the book so good?
First, the obvious enthusiasm of the author is there on every page, explaining, guiding and showing the way all dosed with a generous helping of humour. It has all the things we expect from modern books; good content, well laid out, logical order, lots of web references and a great index but it has much more.
There are clever little extras that help you understand the whole process. For instance there is a great visual explanation of the relationship of the source code and the CSS layout i.e. what floats within what and how to place the important information first in the source code.
The modern use of CSS lists for navigation and CSS drop shadows are explained in a step-by-step way, with all the mystery removed.
The practical use of CSS i.e. how to organise your styles in a logical order and where to put the Internet explorer hacks are covered in detail.
And whilst I appreciate that this is a book review, I must mention that I contacted the author, via email, with a query about one of the layouts in the book. I received a friendly and encouraging response the same day with a full explanation.
And finally, this book contains the best word in the English language, that word is "snafu".
Great word, great book and a great after sales service.

This is, without a doubt, one of the finest books to refresh one's memory about CSS or for those who are new to the subject. I've been using CSS for several years; however, every single book I have read is boring and dry, too lengthy on explanation, or just bad writing. However, I found the style, organization, and layout for this book refreshing and -- more importantly -- memorable. The Mr. McFarland is engaging and personable, but not in such a way that it becomes distracting or annoying. I found myself retaining the information when it came to unfamiliar concepts and entertained when it happened to be one of the subjects I am well acquainted with. While I would not group this book into the realm of reference books -- it's not dry, nor as in depth -- I would definitely recommend this book to those who are like me and need a refresher course. On the flip side, I would also highly recommend this book to those who have no experience with CSS and are looking to learn AND retain what they read.

This is the second "Missing Manual" book by David McFarland that I bought. The first one was "Dreamweaver 8". Both books became valuable assets in my library. Descriptions are clean and easy to follow. Exellent tutorials. I would recommend it to anyone who needs a reference manuals for CSS and Dreamweaver.

Creating websites using html can be very time consuming and somewhat limiting. Making editing changes over multiple pages is downright maddening. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is the answer.

CSS enables the webmaster to set standards such as selecting a particular font size and color for all headings, subheadings, or texts without having to rewrite the html each time. This system also allows editing changes that carry over from one page to another to be changed automatically with a single change. For those trying to manage websites with hundreds of pages, CSS is an obvious must have.

CSS can be undertaken in two ways: manually or in association with various website design programs. Webmasters can manually insert CSS into their existing html code. Doing so is pretty simple, especially for those used to writing their own html. Alternately, Dreamweaver 8 comes automatically equipped with CSS and is simply a matter of choosing formatting options.

Webmasters using either option will definitely find this book valuable. This text includes step by step instructions so that the reader can learn by doing. Actually working with the code is probably the best way to understand the capabilities and time saving abilities of CSS. Even those using the automatic CSS systems will benefit from this aspect while troubleshooting or just realizing the extents of what CSS can do.

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I'm fairly new to CSS and found this book to be extremely helpful in picking off where my intro book left me. Does a very good job in explaining concepts and provides "tutorials" at the end of each chapter to reinforce those which were just taught. The book has encouraged my learning of CSS and I look forward to taking my skills to the next level. I would highly recommend this book for beginner/intermediate CSS developers.

I've got several books on CSS and this is the last one I have purchased, but I don't think I would have purchased the others if I had this one first.
It is very well-written and gives a lot of examples and tutorials. As I was reading it, a lot of light bulbs came on over things I had wondered about in CSS.

The CSS examples in this book helped me solve some of my web design problems. I'm sure I could have googled and found the answer on the web, but it's sure nice to have something fast and handy when I need it.

It is well written and takes you through the process step by step.
This is one of those books which you want to keep it within easy reach.

I purchased this book with the need to learn CSS. Initially I thought that meant simply learning its syntax. This book does that well, but also goes much further to give the reader a deeper understanding of why you want to use CSS and how to apply it.

Mr. McFarland has done an excellent job of explaining the "why" and "how" of using CSS to build effective web sites. He does this with a combination of useful examples, helpful illustrations, pointers to useful resources, and an entertaining writing style. I appreciated the many tips and tricks which have helped me in the real-world application of my new skills. As a matter of fact, this book just helped me to resolve a nasty IE bug that was driving me crazy. Very highly recommended! (The book, not IE bugs.)

Superb textbook! Very readable and easy to understand. Only thing that would make it better is a spiral binder because I'll be referring back to it often.

How is this book excellent?

1. It is well written.

2. Most chapters have 2 styles: descriptive and prescriptive (or read this, do that).

That alone would make it worth quite a bit. But then when you want to get a little deeper, it covers differences between browsers and often gives examples of how to work around those differences.

But wait there is more. It references other web sources if you want to go even deeper.

I agree with one reviewer, this is not the best reference manual. However, it is an excellent book and if you are trying to learn CSS, this is an excellent book to use.

If you need a reference manual, one word: google.

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.

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.

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.

I read this book cover to cover and I found it to be a pleasant read. This book explains CSS in great detail. I liked the author's presentation style. With every chapter, he introduces specific styles, gives example(s) with relevant screenshots of browser display and finally ends it with a tutorial where the reader can see the same in action. It seems to me that this is a very good way to learn something new. The book covers a lot of ground and where applicable presents the differences between browsers for the same set of styles. Specific hacking strategies for IE browser are also included. Another nice feature about this book is that it includes links to external sites that have sample code - I found this to be very useful. There is lot of good information about CSS on the internet, some of which the book does not cover but it points you in the right direction. I will recommend this book to beginners and intermediate users of CSS. This book has impressed me so much that I certainly will not hesitate to buy another book by this author (provided the topic is of interest to me). Deserves Five Stars!!!

The author did a great job of covering all of those items many developers use in their CSS but may not have had the time to review in detail. His book reads well and does a good job of reviewing what's supported in many current browsers, plus what "hacks" may be needed to continue to support IE 6 and below. Very well done ...

I was recommended this book by a colleague and it is already proven to be a valuable resource. I had a problem where my DIVs weren't behaving like I wanted them to. And I actually found the answer and it took me just ONE extra selector that knocked my web page in place!!

Now that's worth the money!! I haven't even read the whole book at that point. I highly recommend this book. I'm new to the whole "Missing Manual" series, but can tell that these books are sort of like the "..For Dummies" books.

If you are a CSS designer, I recommend this book. And the cool part about all this is that my boss thinks I'm a CSS Guru, which I'm not, I just know where to go to find the answers!!!

Add this book to your resource library!!

This is a excellent book to learn CSS, Very detailed, well laid out and McFarland adds more information then just teaching Css; Heck it's like all you need to know really is basic Html.

I'm giving this 5 stars, because it does what it's meant to do. It gives you a crash course in CSS. I've been a big fan of O'Reilly books for a while now. The "Definitive Guide" ones are massive and have tons of information, but they're really dry. This series is sort of a watered down version of those, but it's easier to learn from at a quicker pace. I'm not sure how well this approach would work on a harder topic, but it's pretty good for something simple and fun like CSS.

CSS: The Missing Manual is just a terrific book for anyone who has the slightest interest in learning about Cascading Style Sheets and how they can create stunning web pages.

This book is clearly written with step-by-step instructions that are both easy to follow and fun to try. Best of all...you'll find yourself creating some pretty nice web pages via CSS in no time...and saying, "So that's how they do that!" The downloadable chapter lessons are an extra bonus that I found to be extremely helpful.

If you have the patience and dedication...and really want to learn CSS, this is "the" one book to buy. It's worth every penny of it's $35.00 list price. I would highly recommend it to anyone.

Creo que es el mejor libro que he leido sobre temas técnicos, muy completo, y muy fácil de leer, va mostrando todos los conceptos de una manera clara y sencilla, siempre teniendo en cuenta todos los bugs del explorer.

Realmente muy recomendable.

Although the book has content the samples are terrible, you cannot find the complete code (CSS or HTML) in the book nor in the websites they indicate. One of the websites they point is [...], but as of now (November 2006), the site is not even available! Also, trying to look for the samples at O'Reilly website is useless because they are also not there! What a frustation!!!... For the non-existing samples files, the book is just not worth all the stars... Sorry I cannot give more! Solve the sample problems first. If you want to learn CSS by example be very carefull before buying this book. Look elsewhere first.