I feel that I must first disclose that Stylin’ with CSS was written by someone I work with. That said, I don’t feel that our work relationship swayed my opinion in any way.
I have been doing web development for a long time now and have played around with CSS quite a bit over the years. I can get a lot done with it but have always found that there were certain points that I would get to and just spin my wheels. When I change one property, something else stopped working. When I fixed the something else, the original change broke again. After reading this book I now understand why.
The first handful of chapters go over the way CSS works, its structure, and how browsers go about rendering it. An extremely important part of this is the explanation of hierarchies and relationships between elements. These chapters also focus on the different types of major elements, block and inline, and go into details about how each work. The remaining chapters go over things like how to achieve different layouts and effects and how to create reusable components. In addition to examples in the book there are a number of libraries that can be downloaded from the book’s website that will allow you to quickly recreate any effects in the book with minimal duplication of code.
If you have never heard about or touched CSS, buy this book. If you have just a little bit of web experience and want to learn more about CSS, buy this book. If you have a fair amount of web and CSS experience, consider buying this book. If you don’t know everything about CSS but are very comfortable using it, this is likely not the book for you.
