CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions

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When I heard Andy Budd (http://www.clearleft.com/, http://www.andybudd.com/)was writing a CSS book I knew I had to get it. Andy is one of the top UK web designers for past years and anything he has to say you should listen. :)

This book is for anybody who has played around with CSS a little and wondered "what the h*ll can I do with this stuff?". CSS has been around for awhile now, but only recently has the most current browsers been able to support the cool stuff you can do with it. What cool stuff? You need to buy the book to find out, but I'll give you some highlights...

First off, the first chapter explains how to use document types, divs and spans, validation, basics of CSS (selectors, pseudo-classes, child and sibling selectors, attribute selectors, etc), how cascade and specifity works, and how to organize your style sheets. A great primer to the rest of the book.

The 2nd chapter focuses visual formatting with CSS with the Box Model, Positioning and Floating. This is an important topic because creating CSS layouts requires a good understanding of how these topics work (and work together) in creating "real-world layouts.

Chapter 3 talks about using background images and replacement in creating rounded corner effects, drop shadows (4 different kinds), and some cool image replacement for optimizing search engines and screen readers (accessibility).

Chapter 4 has some great examples on styling links to create efficient CSS buttons without the images or the JavaScript for the "roll-over" effect. Yes, CSS can create some cool buttons without you ever having to use Photoshop. :)

Chapter 5 continues with styling links but extends it in showing you how to create button nav bars (horizontal and vertical) and adds a few tricks with using some image placeholders and sections to create some nice looking professional navigation for your website.

Chapter 6 focuses on the right way to use tables: for displaying data (not layout for web sites - no more nested tables). With the use of the very popular border-collapse property and others, Andy shows some very eye-please table layouts.

Chapter 7 in my opinion is the meat-and-potatoes of the book. Its goes over some how to use CSS in creating some standardized layouts. The whole point of CSS is to separate your content and layout and this is the way to go. It is explained in a very easy to follow manner with plenty of screenshots to show you each step.

The rest of the book (Chapter 8 and Chapter 9) review the common and not-so-common CSS hacks that are used to overcome some browser deficiencies. I can't tell you how many website I had to search to find out about these, and its all here in these 2 chapters!.

The last part of the book has 2 Case Studies that show how a website created purely with CSS was created from beginning to end. A great finish to a great book.

Throw out all your other CSS books and just get this one.

This is quite a useful book, as has been well documented in other reviews. The tips are helpful, the examples are useful, and the typography and layout are easy on the eyes.

However -- and this is a big however -- the book is riddled with technical errors. The errata file, available for download from the publisher as a PDF file, currently runs a whopping 11 pages. While a small handful of errors in a technical book's first edition is inevitable, 11 pages is not a small handful for a book as thin as this. It's really inexcusable that so many errors -- some of them quite obvious -- made it past the editor.

While I don't recommend this book for beginners, it is close to a perfect intermediate text on using CSS well. The book covers the most common tasks a web designer will encounter, and clarifies some of the complexity of CSS. The book also covers cross-browser issues - the most common problem that web developers will encounter.

Before you buy this book from all the glowing reviews check this link below, & it will show you all the aggravating typos in this book. (10 total pages of corrections.)

http://www.cssmastery.com/CSSMastery-Errata.pdf

It makes it very irritating to use.

The book is good if you are ready to stick with it, but before I buy from these authors again, I am waiting for the errata to be a few months old. It kind of feels like a ripoff to get a book that you have to constantly go back & forth to a pdf (painful) to make sure it isn't a typo on your part when css does not work as expected.

I like friends of ed books in general, but we do pay money for these things as customers & should demand more from authors.

This is a decent book on advanced CSS, although there is more coverage given to CSS basics than I would have thought. Pretty much everything I read in this book I have read at an earlier time on one of the many excellent CSS sites on the web, including w3Schools, aListApart, 456 Berea Street, etc etc. While this book puts it all in one place, its easy to build a bookmark collection of good articles online that you can cut and paste from. This will likely be the last web technology book I will buy...online has surpassed the printed form in both quantity and quality. I do have some gripes with the specific content covered - much of it covers what I consider to be pointless chrome like dropshadows and rounded edges, and other gimmickry. Yet where is the discussion about modelling css for large organizations? I work in a firm where literally hundreds of people are using css everyday, and there are serious large-scale modelling issues.

[...]

It's been awhile since I've enjoyed a good technical book. Most of the time they drone on and on about stuff I either already know or more often, stuff I don't know and would take years to know. It's so great when I find a book that matches where I'm at technically and one that really becomes part of my everyday working life. Designing with Web Standards was one, CSS Mastery is now the other.

Andy Budd now lives right next door to Zeldman on my desk. Seriously, CSS Mastery is a great title. It's not beginning CSS, which means you should have some working knoweldge of CSS already before you pick it up. This isn't a book that teaches you to know CSS, it teaches you to master it.

Andy covers the stuff that will supplement your existing knowledge. He doesn't waste time telling you about the difference between a class and an ID, or the value of shorthand. What he does tell you is why some margins collapse in some browsers and not in others, and how to fix the problem. He briefly explains the attribute selector, but goes right into how and when you might want to use it.

The chapter I found the most valuable to me was the section on forms and tables. Being primarily concerned with layout and text, I haven't had to spend a lot of time looking at data, whether it's being input (form) or output (table). Again, Andy doesn't spend too much time talking about the details of creating a form or a table, but he doesn explain how to style each section of data with real-world examples and backup ideas, or alternatives to his style.

I especially love the last two chapters, where Andy let's Cameron Moll and Simon Collison have at it with a couple of design, applying some of the things Andy talks about in the book. It's awesome to get their perspective, and it adds a ton of credibility to what Andy has to say.

I recommend this book to anyone who has a firm grasp of CSS already and wants to take it further. If you're not completely comfortable with CSS, you might want to check out some other resources first. Or... just be aware that you might not get some added explanation to Andy's techniques because he assumes you already know.

I worked with this book for about 4 days over the holidays playing with CSS. When it initially arrived, I was suprised that it was only about 1/2" thick. The first two chapters are basically a recap of CSS at the upper /intermediate level.

I really wouldn't recommend this book for someone that wants to learn CSS, but rather, this book should be used for those who are looking for a reference on how to deal with specific browser issues( especially IE ) and CSS.

There are two major issues that I do have with this book. One, the author tosses out bits and pieces of CSS source code, but never includes the source code in its entirety. You can, of course, download the complete source code from the authors site. The problem with this is that if you have the full source, but the book only explains specific elements, you may become lost when viewing the full source.

Second, I belive that the author could have included more detailed information on real world problems when dealing with visual layouts. For example, CSS has nifty features like being able to place a border around a box, something that you have to do with spacers when using tables. However, coming from a table based layout world, you can split a table in half, and in the bottom right column stick in a footer that will "float" with the contents of the left column, something that seems to be a bit of a challenge to do. Yes, maybe I need to go back a step and find another book that details this information, but from the books description, I came to believe that these types of scenarios would be discussed.

Nearly every page of the book deals with CSS and how IE needs a hack to display properly. It almost makes the reader feel over consumed by the fact that CSS is just lovely, but "I" need to keep a complete journal on everything to include to make CSS work with IE. Actually, the author should just come out with a pocket reference book named "The Complete CSS Hacks Pocket Reference" - that nearly sums up what this book is about.

I'll probably stick this book on the shelf, as I know it will come in handy at some point when dealing with specific problems that I may encounter with CSS and those pesky IE issues. Overall, the book should simply be named "How to make IE display CSS properly" rather than CSS Mastery.

If you are a web developer or designer and haven't read this book yet, you are cheating your employer for the extra time you spend, and you are cheating yourself. Doing web dev without the knowledge of this book is like repairing an automobile with a pair of pliers. It's not the easiest way to get things done.

The mystery of why some divs don't hold their size, why they don't stay in place, how to get divs to wrap, and then more importantly, stop wrapping.

Yes, you'll learn how to make web 2.0 looking tabs, and rounded corner boxes. But you can find that code on the Internet. You get this book so you can understand HOW that stuff works.

Andy budd and his cohorts have crafted a book that might just be the only practical CSS reference (unlike a CSS property dictionary) available to professional web developers today. The book encompasses what industry experts are already thinking and what novices need to comprehend. The authors are precise with their explanations and a majority of the book is filled with what I will call, "intellectual brevity." In other words, as a senior user interface developer, I appreciate the fact the authors get in, tell me what I need to know, and then get out. This is done in manner that allows for the book to remain a useful resource even after the initial reading.

In a nutshell, CSS Mastery encompasses a majority of the semi-advanced CSS techniques that can be found from online web development publications and blogs. Of course, a major advantage of the book is these concepts are all explained by several people with a collective wealth of CSS experienced and knowledge. The beauty of this book outside of the authors' CSS wisdom is that it brings all of these techniques to the reader in a well organized and digestible format.

A monumental part of the book is stated in the first sentence of the second chapter which reads, "Three of the most important CSS concepts to grasp are floating, positioning, and the box model." I couldn't agree more. After this statement, Andy proceeds to solidify the three concepts through the rest of chapter 2 and the entire book. Now, if you get anything out of this book it should be just how pivotal the first sentence of chapter 2 really is on the road to being a CSS master.

If you're looking for something a little new, the last three examples in chapter five demonstrate some groundbreaking usages of CSS. As well, the book gives some face time to the (not so) soon to be CSS3 specification. "Not so soon," in consideration of how long the CSS2 specification has been completed.

Really about my only critique of the book is in Chapter 6, in which I think more time could have been spent detailing the styling of forms and less about their layout. In addition, I felt like the usage of tables for an HTML form layout should have been addressed.

Other then my small gripes about chapter 6, the book is a must have for any CSS professional!

I am going to go out on a limb here, and assume that if you are currently reading this review, you are interested in web design. If that's true, then you should really purchase CSS Mastery by Andy Budd (AndyBudd.com). No, seriously - Just buy it right now, and read the rest of this review later.

This is one of the most valuable web design books I have ever read. You could think of it like a compilation of every cool CSS trick and technique that has been discovered / invented to date. While you might be familiar with some of these methods already, having them all at your fingertips in one place makes this book worth its weight in gold.

Ever wonder how to do those cool Flickr style roll-over tags? Confused about the many available methods of text / image replacement? Longing for an effective way to comment your code? Need a better understanding of all the CSS hacks and filters (yes, there's a difference) out there? This book covers it all. It's not only smoke and mirrors though, as there are several chapters on solid principles such as specificity: descendant / child / adjacent selectors, as well as absolute and relative positioning. There are also the requisite chapters on advanced layout techniques and creating functional navigation systems.

As if that wasn't enough, Andy has enlisted the help of two other CSS Masters: Cameron Moll (CameronMoll.com) and Simon Collison (CollyLogic.com) to help wrap things up. These are two guys who are not only visual design experts, but also know how to create beautiful code. They have each contribued a case study chapter, showing how to create a professional looking site from scratch, describing each step along the way.

Dan Cederholm (SimpleBits.com) has described this book as "a card catalog of indispensible solutions, tricks, and tips that a web professional such as yourself should not be without." CSS Mastery isn't for beginners, but if you're already familiar with the basics and are ready to kick it up a notch, this is the book for you. I am typically not one to over-hype things, but I was genuinely impressed with the sheer amount of information packed into such a concise read. It is definitely one that will remain near my desk, within arm's reach, for years to come.

Andy Budd's new book 'CSS Mastery' is a real gem! I'm only half way through and can barely put it down. Its very well written and very nicely laid out, and yet it's the content that is king here!

The book is filled with a wealth of to-the-point pracitcal examples, all detailed with logical rationales, for making CSS with clean mark-up really work in a world of variably compliant browsers.

A perfect compliment for the seasoned web pro, and ideal for the relative nubee as well who wants to learn the craft of clean XHTML and CSS design and layout the right way from the start. For the rank beginner, a good place to dive in is Craig Grannell's comprehensive 'Web Designer's Reference', followed by Dan Cederholm's superb 'Bulletproof Web Design'. Those two works, coupled with Andy Budd's 'CSS Mastery' are sure to elevate the quality of web sites everywhere.

Many of those brain-storming thoughts like "wouldn't it be great if I could just do ...." will find a positive reply here, and I suspect 'CSS Mastery' will wind up, along with Cederholm's new book, as one of the most dog-eared reference favorites among active web designers.

Throw in Jeremy Keith's timely new book 'Dom Scripting' and you've got it covered from A to Z!

Unpacking and Cover

Very nice presentation. Colors are fun and appealing, yet refined and not overly designed. Font choice for the cover did well for the many SS's that are found in the title.

Going Through in No Particular Order

As an experienced CSS designer, I'm looking for the gems here. These are mostly well-known techniques for producing web standards compliant CSS designs, however quite often their implimentation is poorly documented or non-existent. So having a diagram / screenshot rich book layout is quite illuminating. Here goes.

AlphaImageLoader for IE5.5 ++

This technique is great for all uses of PNG images. PNGs are particularly fun to use in stylesheet backgrounds. Looking for that plush drop-shadow? Here's the solution.

Remote Rollovers

Just like Flickr does with notes [..] it is often handy to javascript to do remote rollovers. But is there a CSS-way to create remote rollovers? With images it's not very difficult.


position the div containing the image relatively (this means every element within this div can be placed relative to the image)
empty span before the link you want to tricker the hover
position hover content absolutely (be clear, this is absolute position relative to the image div)
there's a little workaround for IE doing remote rollovers, require all a:hover within the image div to border: none, so that a hover border can be place on each hotspot


Elastic-Liquid Hybrid Layouts

This is one of my favorites. Using max-width as a percentage and width in ems, the layout will scale relative to the font size (which should be placed at 62.5%-62.5% of 16 is 10 pixels) but never scales larger than the browser window. Yeah!

Don't forget to scale your images when using liquid or elastic layouts.

set the image as a background images, and just crop it with a relative CSS box
or put the image on the page and set a width % with a max-width of the actual width of the image (book example, see the three content images changes has you resize the window

More Conditional Statements

From now on, this designer will be using conditional statements for all those IE6 folks who haven't yet upgraded to Longhorn or switched to a Mac.

Min-width and Max-width for le IE 6

This simple statement set's the min-width and max-width of #container and #footer using a javascript extension. It will break our CSS validation, therefore it should go in a ie.css stylesheet. This is great for liquid or fluid or hybrid layouts.

Conclusion

If you really like web design, go buy this book and study it. Great resource and a powerful addition to the emerging academia of Web Design.

This review, including code snippets at[...]book-review

I've gone thru half the book, and I'm very disapointed to say the least.
I've done some html and css for abaout a year now, and I have'nt had any problems following a book in those subjects until now.
The images that you need isnt there and when they are there the exercices doesnt work as you expect, inspite that I doublecheck 5 times so that I don't forget something in the code.. so boring.
I'm convinced that most of the "5-star" reviews are sent in by the authors themselves. I dont recomend this book.

To my web designer friends who are ready to move beyond DreamWeaver/GoLive and start doing things the "right" way, I have been recommending Dan Cederholm's "Web Standards Solutions" as the best beginner's CSS and HTML guide. I also tell them that they should buy this book, CSS Mastery, at the same time and start reading it once they have absorbed all of W.S.S.

CSS Mastery doesn't QUITE cover enough of the basics of applying CSS to HTML for it to qualify as a beginner's book. However, it does such an incredible job of covering every possible aspect of designing with CSS that it makes the perfect intermediate book.

When beginning to learn web design using pure XHTML and CSS, there is a lot of ground to cover, especially if you are used to working with tables. You can either spend countless hours online searching for all the tricks and work-arounds necessary to effectively use CSS, or you can buy this book and find them all in one place.

Well, maybe I don't know everything there is to know about CSS, but I totally refurbished the look and feel of my web site with the help of this book alone.

In particular, I brought a web site that looked like it was done in the "stone age" of the Internet (you know, the 1990's) into the 21 century with a state-of-the-industry look and feel -- while preserving the brand identity -- with this book alone.

I had never used CSS at all before, and I accomplished this during my "down time" in a week.

If you are new to CSS and want to get up to speed quickly, this is the book for you!

The book's subtitle is "Advanced Web Standards Solutions", which partners it explicitly with the excellent "Web Standards Solutions" by Dan Cederholm, also published by friends of ED.

It's a legitimate comparison, as Budd's book is good follow-on. While Cederholm's book concentrates mostly on semantics, and only introduces CSS, Budd's book is concerned mostly with the dirty truth of browser incompatibilities, hacks and the disappointments behind the theory of CSS. That's not to say he forgets markup or semantics; there are regular mentions of accessibility, which is refreshing in CSS books as they generally tend to pander to visual designers exclusively. I was also pleased to read a discussion of the recent fad of abusing the dl element.

Budd is not only opposed to markup abuse; he also cautions against wanton CSS abuse:

There is a rather unfortunate overreliance on hacks and filters, especially with those new to CSS. When something does not work in a particular browser, many CSS developers will immediately employ a hack, seeing it as some kind of magic bullet. In fact, some developerss seem to measure their expertise by the number of obscure hacks and filters they know. (page 155)

Amen, Brother Budd!

The two chapters that have been the most practical use to me as a reference have been the "hacks and filters" chapter and the "bughunting" chapter, the latter having very useful information on IE bugs and hasLayout. It's saved me hours when banging my head against a CSS brick wall. Much of this information (by no means all) is available scattered around the Web, but I'm not a great fan of Googling for frustrating hours when a deadline looms, if I can have it all explained to me in one place.

For me, there's not much to fault in the book. There are a few inconsistencies between Budd's chapters and the case-studies by Messrs Moll and Collison. For example, Budd writes (correctly) on page 64 that "many of the most popular screenreaders ignore elements that have their display value set to none or hidden", whereas on page 193, Collison writes "Use display:none wisely ... Spare a thought also for anyone using a screenreader for hidden content still exists and will therefore be read by such devices". The publishers should have caught this contradiction.

One of my biggest bugbears, the Accessibility Old Wives' Tale(tm), is to be found on page 130: ".. many screenreaders will ignore text between form elements, unless they are enclosed in a label.". So, which screenreaders are those? Gez Lemon, one of the people I trust most to test his code with assistive technologies, has written accessible form help that has plenty of text outside labels. So this is a plea to all authors, not just Budd: if you make statements like "some browsers" or "many screenreaders", please identify the culprits.

The faults I find are comparatively trivial compared with the time that this book has directly saved me - and, as I don't get paid by the hour, I like saving time. It's a worthy companion to the Cederholm book, and I've no hesitation in recommending it.

Great book. This covers more advanced topics like hack management and teaches frontend developers to work around known browser bugs. Andy Budd does a great job explaining the "hasLayout" issues and proposes workable solutions. One thing of interest was the remote rollovers that use CSS - the CSS version of image maps.

He also does a great job keeping "code" consilidation as an ongoing, underlying premise throughout the book. He uses a few examples of combining classes, which help keep the (X)HTML and CSS bloat factor down to a minimum.

The idea of fluid or liquid layouts is taken one step further than other books on CSS. He focuses on making all elements within the site fluid, not just the text and parent containers. With the methods taught in this book, your images will also respond to the size of the browser window. Nice touch.

He discusses advanced topics in a manner that are easily digestable. We saw a British Invasion in the 60's with the Beatles. It looks like we may have another British invasion now - in the world of web design and web standards. He is one of many outstanding developers/authors from England who are rising up in the web arena.

Last week, I bought CSS Mastery. I have been working with CSS for page layout for about 3 years. The first year was mainly learning through tutorials from Macromedia and trial and error. I also spent time away working on fund raising for my ministry role with Campus Crusade for Christ. About a year ago I implemented my first site using CSS and XHTML for layout. Since then, I have done about 5 more designs including several my personal blog. I would consider my CSS knowledge and experience as intermediate. So I was excited to get this book and improve my skills.

And I have not been disappointed. I have only read a couple of chapters of the book, but it has already been very helpful. The first chapter alone was worth it for me. I went back and rewrote the code for a site that I have been working on. Because I had a better grasp of some foundational principles, I was able to implement better coding which cut down on the amount of code and needless div tags. I appreciated all the tips that Andy gave on structuring, planning, organizing and maintaining stylesheets. I learned so much from only 25 pages. And I was able to immediately implement what I learned.

This morning I read the second chapter on the visual formatting model (box model and positioning) while waiting for new tires to be installed on my car. I was restless with ideas as I gained a better grasp on these foundational concepts. I can't wait to start using this knowledge to build better layouts and implement better solutions. I just barely got into the next chapter on background images and image replacement. My mouth is watering with anticipation of what I am going to learn next. I can't wait to learn more and using it in practice.

This is the most practical book on CSS that I have read or looked at. I have tried to work through some others books that are mostly exercises. I gain some insights here and there. But this book has taught me so much and really filled in my foundational knowledge so that I can take my CSS to the next level. This is going to be one of the books that stays on my shelf for quick reference.

Before buying this book I owned four books on CSS including both editions of Eric Meyer's "Cascading Style Sheets The Definitive Guide" (O'Reilly). Meyer's book is a very good reference book. It gives you all the syntax and rules for using CSS; so I rate it high in giving me knowledge. "CSS Mastery" wasn't written as a reference book, it's strength is in showing you the right way to do CSS.

For example, to get a web page the way want it I often find myself using many classes to differentiate selectors in my markup and thinking that's a good thing. In the first pages of the book Andy makes a case against using more than a few classes and completely convinced me to change my ways. I was technically competent, now I'm wiser. And if you are already familiar with CSS usage the book is an easy read.

I recommend this book to anyone with knowledge of CSS already. For beginners I would recommend Eric Meyer's book (the O'Reilly book mentioned above) as a reference and this book as a CSS style guide. Maybe the only two books needed on CSS.

I am a quick-fix guy. If I run into a problem with my website I look for the 1st script, code, or hack that best fits my problem, then customize it accordingly. Andy is a professional. He is less concerned about the quick-fix than he is about proper code usage and browser compatiblity on a long-term scale. If you are very concerned about the latter, browser compatibility, then this book is for you.

However, be aware, this book was published prior to the release of Internet Explorer 7. So although Andy goes indepth about the compatibility quirks of IE 6 he fails to cover IE 7. The good news is that IE 7 seems to have patched up some of those IE 6 quirks, so if you take Andy's advice and use the standards compliant CSS then you should have no problem adapting your website to more and more standards compliant browsers.

This book also gives some previews of yet-to-be-released CSS 3 as well as proper HTML and XHTML use.

Finally, as an amateur CSS programmer, I felt, before I read this book, that I was not utilizing CSS to its max. My stylesheets were limited to simple layout and typography tags. This book fully explained professional techniques that truly harness the power of CSS.

Before I bought this book, I thought I was pretty good at css. I bought it just to fill in many of the little gaps in my knowledge. Some of the 'hows' and 'whys'. There were a few things I knew I didn't understand, like positioning and fully understanding what "cascading" is. So when I bought it I thought it would be just a good reference and gap filler, but as I started reading I realized how much I was lacking in my CSS knowledge!

This book goes over everything you could possibly imagine. After reading it I understand what the browser is thinking as it parses your css and html files. It also uses diagrams and example images to show you how things work. It explains all the advantages to using CSS instead of hard coded markup.

This book goes through all the styles in CSS 2.0, all the browser differences (although it does need to be updated to include IE 7), and gives example websites.

One of the reasons I chose this book was because of the glowing reviews it received. It was absolutely worth it!

From novice to intermediate, this book encompasses the basic to advanced features of CSS design. It covers the major browsers, shows issues associated with each and offers one or more solutions to solving them. As a veteran web developer/designer I bought this book as a refresher for my CSS skills but actually learned a myriad of new techniques which I can take to my job. I've passed this book along to my junior designers and we all use it as our main reference for CSS goodies.
Good job Andy!

I have worked with CSS about 2 years. I read Molly E. Hlzschlag's Cascading Style Sheets - The Desigers' Edge as my first learning book. That book gave me basic knoledge of CSS but that wasn't enough. Many times I copied and tweaked other people's code from blogs but I didn't always understand what I was doing. There were missing parts in my CSS understanding. This book CSS Mastery provided me those missing parts. Andy Budd knows what many developers are missing. If you're a very begginer, you might find parts you don't understand in this book. But as you build your skills, you'll learn more and more from this book. This book is indeed a "must have" and a good reference book as well.

(originally published on http://www.last-child.com)


Don't let the title of Andy Budd's recently released book, CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions, fool you. Yes, it is filled with advanced CSS information; but it isn't just for the advanced programmers. I bought this book with the hope of learning some of Andy Budd's positioning, descendent selectors, and cross-browser techniques. I didn't expect to learn some of the basic elements of CSS.
Easy to read and use

Andy's writing style is easy on the eyes. He knows when to skip remedial information and when to point out the important tidbits that save an hour or so. For example, Budd describes the behavior of collapsing margins with a clarity that other books have lacked.

...It may seem strange at first, but margins can even collapse on themselves. Say you have an empty element with a margin, but no border or padding. In this situation, the top margin is touching the bottom margin and they collapse together...

This is why a series of empty paragraph elements take up very little space, as all their margins collapse together to form a single small margin.

...Margin collapsing only happens with the vertical margins of block boxes in the normal flow of the document. Margins between inline boxes, floated, or absolutely positioned boxes never collapse.
CSS Mastery - Advanced Web Standards Solutions pgs 32,33

I've already placed a few flags in the book and they'll multiply as I return for more techniques. Was this book worth purchasing? I found a number of techniques from Andy's personal toolkit that made the book worth 10 double espresso mocha frappathingies. Here's a tip that was particularly timely for me. Andy discusses the use of links with spans to create disjointed rollovers. I'm having an issue in IE6 right now with the span not being entirely clickable.

...Unfortunately this example doesn't quite work in IE on Windows. It would seem that IE/Win has problems targeting nested elements inside an anchor link, using the :hover dynamic pseudo-class. However, there is a simple, if somewhat odd, workaround. Adding the following rule on this anchor's hover state seems to fix the confusion in IE and allow it to honor nested hover state rules:

#pic a:hover {border:none;}

-CSS Mastery - Advanced Web Standards Solutions, pg. 107


That is the kind of gem that only comes from experience.
Who should buy this book?

This book falls into the category of CSS/HTML theory from beginning to end. It starts with the basic platform of semantic coding and moves on towards the final use of advanced techniques. It is a nice replacement for Eric Meyers on CSS and More Eric Meyers on CSS, both of which give basic techniques and information but lack the style of Budd's designer eye. This book reminds me more of The Zen of CSS Design : Visual Enlightenment for the Web by Dave Shea and Molly Holzchlag. CSS Mastery and Zen of CSS are written from the developer/designer's viewpoint. Both contain tips and techniques. While Zen touches lightly on the coding, Budd takes you full circle, from theory to final production.

After going through a round of book buying on Amazon (mainly Ajax and PHP books), I originally decided that this would be a 'glancer' at Barnes and Nobles. Having spent over a year designing full CSS w3c-compliant sites, I though there wasn't too much more I could learn on the subject. A day later I spent over an hour at B&N reading this book and then decided to purchase it. It's that great.

This book doesn't just tell you about CSS, it shows you how to do it right, in both a standards-supporting approach and a clean, efficient, code-consolidating way. While it's not necessarily for beginners (it doesn't discuss basics) it should eventually be read by anyone who thinks they've mastered CSS or would one day like to.

Among other things here are some things in the book that I found useful:

-The CSS box model and how it works. [Including why margins collapse on one another.]
-CSS Image maps, drop-shadow methods, and rounded corner methods - [All fascinating and useful.]
-Using CSS with dynamically created content [One tip in particular that really helped me out.]
-Creating icon links via padding-left, nesting absolute divs inside relative divs, and other creative ideas.

I plan on getting my work to purchase a copy of this book and make it mandatory reading for any future web designers we have. Do yourself a favor and pick it up. It's half the price then what you'd find at the regular bookstore and you'll definitely get your $20 worth.

I gave this book five stars because it fit the needs of our development team perfectly. It is relatively short, but not too fast-paced, it contains plenty of useful and practical examples, it is forward looking in that is mentiones some tricks that are not supported by old browsers but will be supported by most browsers once IE7 comes out, and yet it is well structured and well written, in a way that keeps the reader interested throughout most chapters.

Our small team of Ruby on Rails developers used this book to get up to speed on modern CSS with a lot of success and very short ramp up time. I would highy recommend it to anyone looking to enhance their understanding of modern CSS, get very practical advice and knowledge but not to get drowned in details or history.

Yeah, I have quite a few books on CSS [I don't think it's easy to learn really, one would think so!], and so far this one takes the cake. Even though it says 'Mastery', yet the author is actually quite thorough on all the terminologies, etc. even if you're just starting CSS. Certain things take a bit longer for me to absorb, but he does an excellent job explaining them.

Start with this book.

In my small opinion this is a must-have book for designers wanting to learn CSS. It's probably not for the hard-core coders but more for the massive number of designers who do web as part or all of their service who want to step up their skills.

As well as an excellent foundation explanation, the book shows perfect examples of pretty much all the key elements you would want to know (multiple list styles, image usage, navigation methods to name only a few).

I found this book lit a lightbulb above my head several times about things that I just couldn't get my head around before as well as made me understand the foundations well enough that I could jump online and find solutions (that I could understand - not just cobble together) to more advanced techniques.

I've bought a few CSS books in my search over the last year or so and can honestly say that nothing else has come close to what this book offers in every respect.

also, as a small note: it made a change to use a book made for designers that actually used great design in both the book and the examples shown. Too many other books are written by people who call themselves designers yet use terrible examples and methods. This may seem unimportant but it's not. How can someone teach you design tips when they may not know the right angle of approach.

Mastery in CSS design is not just being able to create the layout you want that looks great in Firefox; it is being able to do so and be confident that you know how it will present in older browsers and IE 5/6. This book will get you there.

Budd describes all the usual techniques for doing total CSS layouts but includes all the gotchas that you have to troll Google for when debugging. It seems like every other paragraph has a last sentence saying 'oh yeah, add this bit so MSIE 5 doesn't barf'. Hugely valuable book for understanding the overall techniques as well as the weird little browser errors and compatibility issues that can take hours to track down and fix.

This is a great book, but not suitable for novices. This was my first book about CSS, and I realized that you need to have a fundamental understanding of CSS before you dive into CSS Mastery. So, if you are a beginner get your basics somewhere else. If you are an intermediate CSS coder, this will teach you many new tricks.
However, it is missing CSS references.

I sent this email to Andy just after I started reading: "I got your CSS Mastery book from Amazon last week, and I just started reading it last night. I'm only 2/3 through the first chapter, but I have to say that your explanation of how CSS works is the clearest, most concise version I've read yet. For all the other books on CSS I've tried to work through, I think this is the first time I really "got it" and wasn't just following along with the examples, nodding with a blank stare on my face. Thank you, Andy Budd. You are a gentleman and a scholar."

I understand this book is meant as more of an advanced work, and some of the later chapters do assume more knowledge than is covered in the first two chapters that review the basics, but the writing is still very concise. I finally grasped a lot of CSS tricks that I had seen on the web before, but not quite "gotten" 'til now. Highly recommended.

I'm a big fan of Eric Meyer's CSS books and used to recommend one of them to CSS neophytes. Now I'm recommending "CSS Mastery."

The trick with CSS is getting the core concepts mentally cemented in place. "CSS Mastery" is well-written, well-organized and extremely clear. That makes it approachable and that means what you read will stick.

"CSS Mastery" is not a CSS reference manual. For that, turn to Meyer's "Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide." But make "CSS Mastery" your first purchase.

This was my eighth CSS book. I wish it had been my first.

I had originally thumbed through this book, subtitled "Advanced Web Standard Solutions" in my local bookstore and shrugged it off as covering pretty much most of what I'd already digested from other popular CSS books. It wasn't until a friend showed me some cool techniques from the book that I properly read though it and regretted not buying it sooner!

Though it's aimed at the intermediate web designer, it is well written and I would certainly recommend this as an essential buy for all web designers. The book begins with Clear:Left's Andy Budd provides most of the content starting with a chapter about well-structured and meaningful mark-up. It's these best practices that will help catapult you into the realms of CSS Master! It then recaps on the box model, positioning and floats, making it easy for a beginner to pick up this book and run with it, before moving into the techniques, with clear and concise examples, including a couple of good chapters on bugs and hacks.

The final two chapters are where Simon Collison & Cameron Moll step in to demonstrate these examples in two real-world showcase websites. This book is absolutely the best book currently on offer for CSS web design.

There are just so many positive things that I have to say about this book I'm not quite sure where to begin. First, I really wish I came across this book last year when I began learning about designing Websites with standards based CSS and HTML.

In that time, I spent countless hours on all kinds of different reference and CSS group sites reading articles and copying suggested fixes and CSS solutions. I accumulated a dozen authoritative links, some with handfuls of links themselves, to reference CSS solutions, fixes to particular quirks and of course hacks and filters. However, amidst the sea of information you still really end up experimenting yourself to determine the particular merit of one solution to another... all of which adds up to a pretty high learning curve which is why some experienced veteran designers still use tables to some extent for layouts.

However, with this book. Andy Budd lends an authoritative, straightforward and experienced voice to the elements, quirks and challenges that you'll face as a CSS designer. Plus he steps you through the solutions without weighing you down with unnecessary technical discussions and jargon. Here is a problem, here is a damn good solution. Some other reviewers have gone more indepth about this book and many suggest only intermediate level designers should use it but even as a beginner you should have this in your collection.

Else, you'll find yourself like me in hindsight wishing you had it a long time ago.

There is a review from 2006 that says this book has a huge errata file. The first printing had some errors, but they have all been fixed in the later printings.

Overall the book is truly exceptional. Up-to-the-minute CSS info presented in a very readable way.

I would say this is a great book--both if you are new at or more experienced in CSS.

"CSS Mastery" is a fast-paced, hands-on, nuts-and-bolts workbook for web design standardistas. The book is worth buying for Chapter 2 alone, "Visual Formatting Model Recap", where you'll no doubt find yourself often enough while wrestling with CSS positioning oddities. A chapter on table styling is welcome as well, as tables have their place in web design yet are often given short shrift in CSS books.

This book is not meant to dazzle with sweet design inspiration (get Andy Clarke's Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design (Voices That Matter) for that!)--but you'll find solid techniques and plenty of them. The included case studies will help you to understand and develop a good workflow as well.

This book is a well-crafted and valuable tool which should be in every web designer's toolkit.

I've read several CSS books, most of them thick, dry tomes.

This book is relatively small (254 pages, including index) and easy to read. But more importantly, it's clearly written. The author has a real talent for getting across concepts that other authors make difficult.

Moreover, the book is filled with very practical, useful tricks that you can use to enhance your sites, while increasing your knowledge of CSS.

This is not a start-from-scratch "learn CSS" book, but if you already know the basics, I *highly recommend* this book.

This is a fantastic book for the Working Web Designer who needs to understand how to use CSS. The projects used as examples are simple enough that you can learn the techniques and interesting enough that you will be able to use them (or derivatives) in your own work.

This is not a complete CSS reference book, and if you're new to CSS I recommend getting this book AND something like the "CSS Pocket Reference" from O'Riley.

This book absolutely accomplishes its mission of providing a useful, accurate desk reference for those of us who know how to create standards-compliant CSS/XHTML Web sites but can't always remember every trick there is. Rather than having a hodge-podge of code snippets, Web site bookmarks and scribbled notes, I just use this book. It's an excellent companion to Jeffrey Zeldman's "Designing With Web Standards," which I also highly recommend. The only CSS "trick" I wish the authors had included was a solid, reliable drop-down menu system that degrades gracefully. Just a nit-pick, hardly a weakness.

CSS Mastery by Andy Budd is basically updated version of Web Standards Solutions by Dan Cederholm. I wouldn't hesitate tell anyone Web Standards Solution is the best CSS book out there, but CSS Mastery makes it complete. I recommend to read Dan's book first because of his excellent teaching style, and then enjoy Andy's get-to-the-point style with this book.

I have purchased many books on CSS in the past few years and this one is by far the best book I have read. I have books from many industry experts and often I find them too detailed and appear somewhat complicated. CSS Mastery simplifies the learning curve to CSS development in a clear, concise manner. The content in this book is elegantly and simply layed out, easy to read, and makes CSS learning a more comfortable experience. Very highly recommended, 5 stars.

When I first read about the availability of CSS Mastery, I was excited. I had been looking for some advanced CSS books to further my learning, and this seemed to be just the ticket. I finally finished reading it last night.

It is the most useful book on CSS I've read (and I've read a lot).

Andy Budd walks you through hacks, filters, test cases... and more. I learned a lot from this book, and feel like it has more than earned a place on my desk. I've already found myself referencing the book when issues come up with CSS layouts I am working from.

The case studies by Cameron Moll and Simon Collison are great. They walk you through a project from start to finish, sharing how they did things from start to finish. They take you through each div, through each selector and detail the techniques they use to create pure-CSS layouts.

This book is a fantastic read. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in taking their CSS to the next level.

This book is solid and informative. The author's writing style is clear and professional. I like it. The book includes discussion of the box model, margins, background images, sliding door techniques, form styling, liquid layouts, rollovers, IE issues, and some cool tricks such as the elastic image. There, the image is styled with percentages instead of pixel measurement. This allows the image to scale with the liquid page layout. Good stuff!

Calling it "CSS Mastery," I expected something more, something jaw-dropping. The dotted leader isn't bad, but I've seen it before. I know from trawling the net that Dave Shea has an article at "A List Apart" called "CSS Sprites: Image Slicing's Kiss of Death" (2004). In it, he demonstrates how to set up a CSS-driven light-up nav panel with different shapes and colors for each button. The technique relies on a bitmap sprite sheet. That trick isn't in here. It should be. It would be great if one of the vaunted CSS gurus (and there are many) would produce a truly advanced CSS book that includes all the wild and visually impressive things one can do with CSS. I had high hopes this would be that book, but no.

So this book is more for people who are new to CSS design, but it is a good book and worth the money. It does include lots of useful information, and I did pick up a few tips. The author elegantly combines ideas I've seen in various other places. Less experienced coders will learn a lot from reading it, but it doesn't offer as much for more advanced CSS designers. Therefore, I give it four stars. Thanks for reading.

A brief but concise book that covers everything you need to know to build an effective web standards CSS site. Lots of examples that can be extended to suit your own needs. If you only get one CSS book, this is probably the one you need.

Ordered the book a while ago. It sit on my self for almost half a year. I grabbed it as a css reference today. Once I opened it, I couldn't stop. It somehow weaved my scattered css knowledge altogether. I am at page 150 right now. Once I am done reading it, I will use it as my reference book.

I am an experienced backend programmer with a little bit html skill. I am mostly relying on graphical guys to create html templates. Now, I might have some control on the graphical side.

This book is a good alternative to the Zen book as it is completely task focus. You pick this book up, and you learn what you need to learn very quickly, the authors of this book did a great job organizing material so that it is easy to focus in on what you need very quickly.

I'm not done with this book, but I feel I have learned a great deal about the do's and don't of css design. I have this book and CSS the missing manual; they are both very good and would recommend them both.

This book focuses on good CSS design, it is not really a CSS reference manual there are many other books that do that well. What this book does is show you what works in real life and what doesn't.

Very well done and enjoyable to read. I will caution however, that it is definitely for Advanced CSS coders. Nevertheless, the examples were really good and references to other links and websites very helpful as well.

Having taught myself CSS layout from what I could g00gle on the net I often found CSS-P more trouble than it was worth. CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions helped me understand things that weren't so obvious to me like specificity, browser incompatibilities and hacks, and how to debug a layout. I can honestly say this book has saved my designs from eternal cross browser debugging. It is a wonderful book for anyone who understands CSS but hasn't grasped it fully. The book also explains some of the limitations of CSS confirming that CSS is not the final solution for web design.

The only minor disappointment was when I finished the book and wished there was more. There are only two case studies at the end of the book, websites that Andy explains how to build, but they are fairly thorough examples. I feel like I am now ready to create more complex CSS based web designs.

This book is well-written, thoughtfully planned out, and concise (yet detailed). I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to become proficient in CSS; it has helped me a great deal.

Not a beginner's book and thank god for that - beginners should start online anyway.

If you've been working with CSS for a while but have some nagging questions that never seem to get answered about the tricky stuff like certain layouts and centering, this is the place to go. Andy Budd appears to possess that rare quality that makes for an excellent how-to author which is a deep awareness of just how hard it was to come by his own solutions to CSS issues and focus on those in his book rather than just reiterating stuff you could get from w3schools and peppering it with the occasional tip that's useful.

The book started out very good by clarifying a few things I missed in Elizabeth Castro's - XHTML & CSS. The author's explanation of the cascade & specificity was not very clear. He only gives you a basic introduction to positioning & fails to truly teach you how to use the CSS positioning properties in an effective manner. My top complaint though is the fact that the case study at http://tuscany.cssmastery.com breaks in IE7 (W T F ?) I would suggest reading Michael Bowers Pro CSS & HTML Design Patterns for a much more informative view of the cascade, specificity & positioning along with code that actually works in projects you may be trying to style up now! That being said - the book does have good sections on commenting your markup, application of filters & hacks & troubleshooting your designs.

I'm a jack of all trades freelance developer. I buy a lot of computer-related
books. I'm usually disappointed. But not with this one.
This book not only has the straight scoop on css positioning I was looking
for (plus backward compatibility tricks for IE6)
it is also well written and easy to read.
I don't see how this book could be given anything less than the top possible
rating.

As a long time user of CSS, I figured I would pick up a few gems from reading CSS Mastery. I was dumbfounded when it seemed to lift the wool from my eyes and shake up the way I analyzed CSS related tasks. Andy Budd is a CSS god and proves it with his clear and concise examples and explanations. Anyone that works with CSS on a regular basis is doing themselves a disservice by not reading CSS Mastery.

This is a great book if you need to know more than just the basics of CSS. It gives you a lot of inspiration and tips in order to improve your existing CSS knowledge. You'll probably want to try all the examples on your own website and see how small things can improve your user's experience.
A must have if you're planning to move your "so-so" website to a "bling-bling" website.

I'm a web developer who is constantly seeking to improve my abilities and try new concepts and although I have a sound understanding of CSS and it's capabilities, I found CSS Mastery to be the best on hand resource for CSS. Andy Budd has a great way of offering several ideas (which I find to be pretty creative at times)for accomplishing a wide variety of things - from creating nav bars to adding drop-shadows using CSS. He also has great things to say about cross-browser bugs.

This is an excellent book. This book crystallized CSS floats in my mind for me. I read it cover to cover and now use it for a reference book. It is not an entry level book, but certainly indispensable if you are using CSS in any form to layout pages.

The collection of knowledge on browser bugs and workarounds is invaluable.

Excellent book with clear, real life case studies. A great way to master CSS.

Just what I needed to get up from this trench of struggling with the styles to work in different browsers. Excellent examples and good tips all the way. I read this book cover-to-cover and bounced up to an intermediate level of designing good stylesheets.

I have read a few chapters now and so far it's very good. A little different layout than I'm used to but it works! ...and best of all is that you get tips, ideas, concrete examples and so on.

I can recommend this! =)

This book was exactly what I was hoping for. A very comprehensive guide for more advanced css users. The examples are very usable and well explained, all the examples delve into what works in what browsers and the filters hacks and work arounds to make it look decent regardless of the browser issues. Very enjoyable read.

Before I begin, let me say this: Order this book! You will not regret it!

Andy Budd together with Simon Collison & Cameron Moll have put together a must have book for any Web Developer/Designer. Well written/organized and easy to read, if you've been looking for a book you can take with you anywhere, CSS Mastery is it.

This might be the only book out there that emcompases most of the current CSS techniques/tricks being used today, with topics such as:

* stylesheet maintenance
* margin collapsing
* image replacement techniques
* image maps
* form styling/layout
* fluid layouts
* elastic layouts
* hacks and filters
* bug fixing

and much more...

From basic concepts such as "planning, organizing and maintaining your stylesheets", to advanced concepts like "fluid and elastic images", this book will give you the necessary tools to be able to tackle any project that requires medium to advanced knowledge of CSS.

If you wish to consider yourself a "CSS Professional" you must read CSS Mastery.

OK, so I was a little hesitant to pick up this book despite all the great reviews. It was all the errors that were printed in the book that I was unsure of. Most of these errors were typos but some were errors in the code. If you don't know much about CSS these would be hard to spot.

I decided to get the book, which I am still reading, and decided I should hi-light all the errors in the book so I am aware of these issues and can fix them fast with no problem. I found that the books are now being printed with about 80% of these errors fixed. All the typos are gone, and most of the code has been fixed. There are still some odd typos in it, like on page 41 it reads when it should be Some Text. But their mostly small little details. It looks like some of these errata were found after the seconded pressing with the fixes and didn't make it to print. I would still highly suggest this book to anyone wanting a further push into the CSS world. I use CSS everyday but found a lot of information in this book that I had no idea about.

If you do plan to get it I would suggest running through his errata page (http://www.cssmastery.com/CSSMastery-Errata.pdf) and check for the errors. It may take a few minutes to do it, but it will at least stop you from pulling out your hair when working through the book.

This was the first CSS book that I purchased. I was always hesitant to purchase a book on CSS because most of the resources that I've found have been mostly beginner's tutorials or instruction and I felt that I had at least a "beyond beginner's" understanding of CSS. I wouldn't go as far as saying I'm an expert at CSS, but at least mid-level to advanced. However, this book had some previous good recommendations from amazon.com so I bit the bullet and bought it. I must say that I was NOT disappointed!

This book starts off with a very quick introduction/recap of CSS basics including good code structure and organization, validation, DOCTYPES, common selectors including IDs and classes, pseudo-classes, and the advanced selectors such as universal, child, attribute and more, and some wonderful reference on the specificity and inheritance, or the "Cascade", the core of CSS. Although this introduction is provided, it is relatively short at about 25 pages and I would suggest a good working understanding of these basics first, as it will help understand the rest of the book easier as opposed to trying to learn CSS for the first time from this book. The following chapter is another quick 15 pages with on "Visual Formatting Model Recap" including the Box Model and Positioning, two EXTREMELY important concepts to understand CSS properly. Although it is short, it is an extremely powerful section.

Chapter 3 finally jumps head first into the code with "Background Images and Image Replacement." With the movement towards "Web 2.0? websites, one of the most common features you'll see in these websites is rounded corners. These can be difficult to achieve successfully and the authors make it very easy. This chapter also touches on different drop shadows and image replacement techniques, which are useful for placing a logo in place but still having the text remain search engine friendly. Chapter 4 is a fairly short chapter on "Styling Links" with some interesting uses of attribute selectors.

Chapter 5 is all about "Stylig Lists and Creating Nav Bars" including the popular "Sliding Doors" popularized by Douglas Bowman of Stopdesign and first published in October of 2003 in A List Apart online magazine. During the section on creating nav bars, this chapter shows how to use CSS sprites for rollovers and visited links, something which I'll be blogging about soon. Chapter 5 also shows how you can use CSS to create image maps, something I've never even thought of doing with CSS.

The next two chapters are two of the best in the book I think. Chapter 6 deals with "Styling Forms and Data Tables", while Chapter 7 tackles "Layout". I think that styling forms properly can be one of the most difficult things to do in a website Chapter 6 shows some good tips and tricks to handle this properly. After all the chapters on styling elements, comes the final code chapter which deals with Layout and shows how to center designs, create two and three column layouts, and liquid, elastic, and hybrid (elastic-liquid), or fluid, layouts.

As any web designer knows, IE doesn't do the best job of displaying HTML and CSS properly according to the W3C. Fortunately, the last two chapters in the book are about "Hacks and Filters" and "Bugs and Bug Fixing", two excellent chapters for dealing with the countless IE CSS bugs. Finally, the last two chapters of the book are Case Studies that put everything together and take you through building two different web sites in a Web Standards way with CSS.

Overall, this is an excellent book, one I'd highly recommend to any web designer, or CSS developer, looking to expand their knowledge of the powerful language that is CSS. Definitely worth adding to your library. On an additional note, this book is published by Friends of Ed, a fantastic publisher of technical books, and one of my favorites. I currently own 8 books published by "Friends of Ed" and 2 more from their parent company Apress, all of which are excellent books.

This book was in a sense life changing for me. It helped lay the foundation for my understanding of CSS and ultimately led me to a job in web development. The writing is very accessible and easy to read. I highly recommend it for anyone who is starting out with web standards.

This book is well written, a breeze to read from cover to cover. It is laid out well, with a logical progression of topics. And it cleared up many misconceptions I personally had with how to use CSS. Unfortunately, CSS references on the internet often use bad techniques due to a misunderstanding of what some key declarations mean. In my attempts to emulate some of these techniques, I frequently found myself having to make large amounts of change for browser compatibility, etc. This book has shifted my perspective on how things should work. Since then, my time spent fine tuning has been minimal.

I would highly recommend it to anyone who was self taught and having troubles getting things to work like desired. Great for beginners up to intermediate too. I think anyone who is truly advanced in CSS will be familiar with most of what is covered, but maybe not bad as a reference.

If I were to recommend one professional level book on CSS, this is it. It offers real world solutions that work across browsers and that are fully standards compliant. Explanations are clear. Examples are well chosen and described and I've found solutions for head scratching problems that actually work.

This is probably not the first CSS book that a web designer should buy. Take the "Advanced" part of the title seriously. But if you have your HTML and chops and a basic understanding of CSS, it definitely belongs on your bookshelf. Or if you're like me, it will be handy on your desk with coffee stains on the cover. It's my first choice reference for anything CSS related.

I heard that this book was for "Advanced CSS Programmers" a while back, so I didn't get it. However, I got it a couple weeks ago because since then I picked up a basic understanding of CSS. I'm half way through the book, and I just want beginners to know that you should get this books first. It's a great introduction, and everything is so well organized. The code is all explained with great detail. This is going to be a very valuable source for me for years to come. Get it!

This resource proved most useful to me when needing to lead the redesign of my company's health care site. Accessibility was not our past strength ironically. I was hired to solve the issues, and this resource made it largely possible. Amazing depth of coverage, smart solutions for developing future design workflow methods... The power of CSS can be monumental IF a designer can produce the proper mark-up to best accommodate future changes and our users' access to clean pages. This book will help you apply this idea. Thank you Andy Budd.

Andy Budd is one of the leading web designers, and this book will provide plenty of information for any designer. This is a resource that I go back to from time to time, and it always seems to answer my questions.

This is a must for any web designer. There are so many clever tricks in here, information about how IE and FireFox interpret css differently (and how to work with that) and ways around bugs in popular browsers. Not for beginners, but the best advanced css book I've found.

I found this book to be really helpful, mainly because of its clarity and simplicity. I've yet to do the 2 Case Studies included, but I intend to because reading this book has shown me that you can only master this information by doing it. Andy Budd, Simon Collison, et al, do a great job of giving you good examples to implement.

While this book has not (nor any other source, so far) answered all of my questions in one fell swoop, it has given me a much clearer overall understanding of what I'm dealing with, allowing me to come up with better questions and strategies for solving problems that come up in making a web page work across popular browsers. I highly recommend it.

Ever tried to tame a 'stubborn' page; Where an element seems to have a mind of its own? If yes, then, Welcome to CSS Mastery.

Do you depend on Javascript to do routine formatting and menu mapping stuff? You need CSS Mastery

Need an effective common set of css methods that work on most browsers? Buy this book and you won't regret it.

Think you still need tables to help with page layouts? Read this book and think again.

Of all the good stuff I see in this book, the most intriguing for me is that HTML can actually be elegant and clean. This is mainly because Andy hand-holds you along a path of logical brevity to 'HTML-reborn': A place where HTML is allowed to do just its originally intended work of semantic markup; Where CSS controls layout and style in an inherently factorable, inheritable and maintainable way.

And hey! Make sure you read Chapters 4,5 and 7, especially.

I have read a few css books, not all but few. For now I can only say this is the best book I've read about CSS and generaly computers. Now I'm reading pro css techniques and that book is not nearly good as css mastery even though some people say that this books are almost same.
If you want to learn modern and advanced css on easy way this should be your first choice.

This book deals with CSS techniques and try to address common CSS problems that a developer could encounter. As it is indicated in the title, this book is not recommended for beginners as there are some difficult topics that can be hard to tackle without a solid understanding of CSS.

I learned more about CSS from this book than from a CSS textbook from my college course.

I've had exposure to CSS in the past and had used it, but not used pure CSS and table-less design. This book was great and put me right where I needed to be. Very helpful real world examples give you what you need to solve almost any CSS issue you'll run into.

CSS Mastery is one of the best advanced CSS books I have read in a while. Andy Budd does an incredible job of articulating the different aspects of CSS. From basic positioning to advanced layout and `tricks.'

The book's style is a very easy read, packed full of great code snippets and screenshots. Andy goes through each aspect - and gives you several options to achieve different tasks. So, while some may prefer method A, he also covers methods B, and C. This gives a designer a great arsenal of tools to get the job done. While showing the different methods, he also goes into detail about the positive or negative effects of using one method over another (such as image replacement).

While the book is an easy read, it seems targeted to the more advanced CSS developer. Each chapter seems to build on the previous, giving you a strong foundation to work with. By the end of the book, you are ready and itching to dive in and create something elaborate. In fact, the last 2 chapters are case studies by Cameron Moll and Simon Collison - and they only fuel the fire to get started right away. Their case studies present fictional businesses and websites, demonstrating many of the techniques covered throughout the book. This gives you a hands on visual to play with and tweak, and help you get a better understanding of different nuances of CSS.

If you work with CSS everyday then this book is a MUST have. I find myself using it for reference as I learn new techniques.

This book is NOT for the beginner. It is barely for the intermediate level Web Designer. Make sure you have quite some experience with the web before you go into this book.

However, I've learnt a heck of a lot of good and mind-opening techniques from this book. It is quite heavy I must admit as many times I find myself needing to re-re-read parts of some chapters and some parts I just have to skip and come back to when I come across a similar situation in my work.

It's worthy to have on your bookshelf but definitely needs a bit more time than other books I have to digest all the new information.

CSS Mastery is a wonderful book if you want to learn CSS and the correct way to code it. There are a lot of CSS resources out there and some lead to invalid code, this book shows you the best way to create valid CSS code. I highly recommend this book to anyone however, if you are new to web design and CSS it might be a little intimidating.

If you only want one book on CSS, this is it! Not only is the reference complete. But it goes one step further offering examples of how to apply CSS. In my opinion that gives it the edge over other books I have on the subject. This is one book that will never go in the garage sale!

I can not argue with many of the other reviews which describe the errors in the book. There are more than a few. However, most advanced CSS users should be able to spot the errors relatively quickly. But lets not concentrate on the errors.

This book is one of the few CSS books that lives up to its title. This is a book on Mastering CSS, and is an advanced book on CSS (the only truly advanced CSS book that I am familiar with). I find myself re-reading this book quite frequently, to reacquaint myself with the information within. CSS is all about details and the results in multiple browsers. This references helps describe the differences not by simply pointing them out, but by illustrating why they occur.

Highly recommended book... any developer who uses CSS should have this reference at their disposal.

I'm very surprised that no one has mentioned the glaring errors in Chapter 3. A lot of the code does not match many of the names from the downloaded files. The code from pages 52-53 is identical to 50-51 even though it mentions that there are different images. The color they mention doesn't match the images. So far, NOT IMPRESSED!

Love this book!! I use it so much pages are falling out. Great book!

If you are truly new to CSS and not really proficient in HTML, browsers and the like, this is not what you need. The authors will have you think that the book targets a general audience, but this is constantly belied by examples were some elements are not yet defined and, as things grow in complexity, become mere hints rather than the dissections one would expect from an introductory book. If you need more than a concentrated pill of CSS to jog your memory, pick CSS: The Missing Manual instead.

This book is helpful. And i needed it for school so it worked out well =]

After giving a reputable online college a chance, I found myself frustrated with their teachings of xHTML in a class called "WWW Fundamentals" which talked about CSS and I didn't learn what I needed to know about writing CSS code for the web. I decided to look through Amazon.com's extensive list of books and came across CSS Mastery, by Andy Budd. This book taught me more in a single week than what my class at the Art Institute taught me in 6 weeks. Through this book I have successfully kicked the habit of "table based design" and now I'm designing web standard based custom web pages using

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