Eric A. Meyer has been working with the Web since 1993 and is principal consultant for Complex Spiral Consulting (www.complexspiral.com). A graduate of and former webmaster for Case Western Reserve University, Eric is also an in-vited expert with the W3C CSS&FP Working Group, and he coordinated the authoring and creation of the W3C?s CSS 1 Test Suite. He often speaks at conferences on the subjects of CSS, Web design, Web standards, and Web browsers, and how they all inter-sect. He is the author of Eric Meyer on CSS, More Eric Meyer on CSS, and Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, to name a few, and the well-known CSS Browser Compatibility Charts. Eric lives in Cleveland, Ohio, which is a much nicer city than most people have been led to believe.

These hands-on exercises, complete with insider tips and detailed color illustrations, teach you the latest techniques for designing Web sites with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). CSS gives you control over the appearance of your Web sites by separating the visual presentation from the content. It lets you easily make minor changes to a site or perform a complete overhaul of the design. In CSS Web Site Design Hands-On Training, you’ll start with a review of CSS essentials, learn to build effective navigation and page layouts, and then move on to work with typography, colors, backgrounds, and white space. The included CD-ROM is loaded with classroom-proven exercises and QuickTime training videos, and real-world projects take you through the Web page creation process, one step at a time. Over 60 Step-by-Step Tutorials
• Using CSS and XHTML together
• Learning essentials of selectors, inheritance, and the cascade
• Creating CSS navigation
• Laying out pages with CSS
• Adding colors and backgrounds
• Setting typography
• Creating white space, margins, and borders
• Creating tables
• Styling for print
• Plus much more!

Learn CSS with hands-on exercises and training videos.

Do you learn by doing? Do manuals leave you bored and craving real world examples? Do you want concrete training that goes beyond theory and reference materials? If so, this book is for you.

These hands-on exercises, complete with insider tips and detailed color illustrations, teach you the latest techniques for using CSS for web design. Internationally recognized expert, Eric Meyer, provides a gentle, hands-on introduction to using CSS. The book is aimed at beginners and demonstrates various principles and basic techniques in the award-winning style of the Hands-On Training series from Lynda.com. The focus is on bringing the reader up to speed with the basics of using CSS, using an example Web site as the basis for most of the training.  Also covered are fundamental concepts such as the cascade and how CSS and XHTML are brought together, as well as how they depend on one another.

Eric A. Meyer has been working with the web since late 1993 and is one of the world’s foremost experts on the subjects of HTML, CSS, and Web standards. A widely read author, he is also the founder of Complex Spiral Consulting (www.complexspiral.com), which focuses on helping clients save money and increase efficiency through the use of standards-oriented Web design techniques and counts Apple Computer, Macromedia, and Wells Fargo Bank among its clients.
Author of Eric Meyer on CSS (New Riders) and Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide (O’Reilly & Associates), as well as numerous articles for the O’Reilly Network, Web Techniques, and Web Review, Eric also created the CSS Browser Compatibility Charts and coordinated the authoring and creation of the W3C’s official CSS Test Suite. He has lectured to a wide variety of organizations including Los Alamos National Laboratory, the New York Public Library, Cornell University, and the University of Northern Iowa. Eric has also delivered addresses and technical presentations at numerous conferences, among them the IW3C2 WWW series, Web Design World, CMP, SXSW, the User Interface conference series, and The Other Dreamweaver Conference.
 
 

Modern concepts sprinkled with insights
I was surprised at the depth. Hands on training books are perceived as starter books. However, in this book there are any less-than-obvious tidbits for front-end developers - even those that already use CSS all the time and may think themselves past such a book. I teach an adult ed class on css and always look for lessons I can share with my students. I recommend this book to them because it has modern concepts sprinkled with insights that even an experienced coder may not have thought of. The chapters each are build around a single concept, and they explore permutations of that concept in examples the student builds using a provided web page that is completely ready, minus the code they are studying in that chapter. The last chapter puts it all together and lets the student build the page they have been working on the whole book pretty much from scratch. The IE ’haslayout’ problem another reviewer pointed out IS huge - it it the reason I give this 4 instead of 5 stars, but that is really my ONLY gripe with this book.

This book smells good
This is a great book for someone learning CSS or for someone who might have skipped a few basics when they learned CSS originally. Eric Meyer is pretty much the most famous author of CSS books. His books rarely miss.

The book is very high quality as far as being easy to read. It uses high quality paper and print. The examples are in full color and are very sharp. This book is definitely easy on the eye balls - major kudos to whoever handled this part of the process.

One odd thing is that the book smells really good! I buy lots of books and this is the only one that has an odor. I don’t know what smell it is but it smells a little like fresh pears. Great for long flights because it doubles as an air freshener.

Unfortunately, like most css books, the examples often do not work for all browsers. Most of these good authors are in love with their Macs so much that they test only on an operating system and browser that less that 5% of people use. This book , like the lynda.com site it promotes, has the same problem - it is geared towards the few people who use a Mac.

The free 3 day trial to lynda.com was exciting until I signed up and saw it was 100% QuickTime(mac) format. I will never make the mistake of installing QuickTime again.

These books and tutorials being made on and for Macs and QuickTime are a PLAGUE right now. I am putting my wallet away for a while until these authors start releasing tutorials that cover more than Mac specific issues.

A great comprehensive tutorial for beginners.
As a CS major, I had taken a web programming course that mostly dealt with Javascript and PHP but didn’t heavily emphasize the design, and had been meaning to learn CSS sometime. As a beginner, I’ve looked at some online tutorials, but none presented the materials well. When I saw this at a bookstore, I was immediately drawn by the easy layout of the contents as well as the fully-colored screenshots of a current page as checkpoints (color helps a lot compared to other black-and-white texts, especially given the subject is CSS).

The author provides a fictional site (all codes and video tutorials included in the CD), from which he well explains the various aspects of CSS over 10 chapters, the last of which summarizes everything that you will have learned by the end. I especially liked how he had separated the unnecessary parts into an external stylesheet so that a reader can discard them and will know exactly what he has just modified actually does to a site. The author also breaks each chapter into smaller sections, with each latter continuing from previous ones (much like Skinner shaping his pigeons in small steps), so I was never overwhelmed or frustrated.

I rate this book a 4, however, because there are minor typos (mostly missing dashes or periods in selectors) in the book that may confuse some, and I feel the author should have proofread better when codes are crucial. They are easy to locate and fix and the provided codes in the CD are without mistakes, so you can always look at the next section in the CD to see what the correct code should be.

Like others have complained, the author only seems to have tested this on Firefox on a Mac, and I’m not sure how different the site is on IE7 (both externally and internally), but in all fairness, the author does mention how some aspects do not work on IE and how to get around them.

If you are a novice to CSS and want to teach yourself, I highly recommend this book.

A true tutorial about CSS
There are a lot of books about CSS. There are a lot of books pretending to be a tutorial about CSS. In my opinion, this book is one the few recent books about CSS that is worth for a beginner in the field.

Good for beginning CSS users
This book was a good start for learning CSS. It works solely with code instead of using Dreamweaver CS3 interface box in the design view. I was expecting to learn more about the interface box but the entire book uses code in a text editing program. Overall a decent book but I will definitely need other to supplement it.

lackluster and thin
This is my beginner’s opinion and experience with this book.

Open an html file in a text editor and do this. Now refresh your web browser and see what happens? Wow!

This book is full of just that. It just barely goes into explanation of exactly why you are doing what you are doing, and that really there is another external CSS style sheet that is working in the background of the embedded code you are made to write in the exercises. So in reality it’s not so easy. I found it confusing how I kept having to look from the embedded styles in the exercises and the external CSS style sheet to really see how everything worked together. Tedious is the word I would use with this book. It only skims the surface of beginning CSS. It would have been better if we could have completely styled the practice website with explanation, exercises and examples, and then exported the style sheet. Also there is no repetition about what was covered. We are provided with one example and bingo that’s it. The rest is left for you to remember. It’s not even a good reference book. This book is all over the place.

Also the book uses the same Javaco Tea website, as a practice site that is used in far too many Lynda Weinman books, in my opinion. These books are not cheap and it would be nice if a different example was used. Mix it up a bit. I would have liked to have seen how developers position those cool borders and graphics you see on some sites.

I felt that this book was written in an after thought fashion and does not go into explaining or challenging a person to practice with examples on their own. It lacks substance. It’s thin. It would have been nice to see a chapter by chapter review or a summary of the various things we had gone over. A memory device.

What is provided is repetitive do and see exercises that are not fully conceived.

I also read Learning Web Design: A Beginner’s Guide to (X)HTML, StyleSheets, and Web Graphics by Jennifer Niederst Robbins and found it much more substantial and richer in detail.

How is this possible?
I’m am very disappointed that the authors have not provided fixes to the CSS that is in this book. How can someone be teaching a book on CSS and that CSS not work in the most widely used browser, IE? I prefer Firefox myself but but I know any CSS layout I create will have to work in IE, no matter what my preferences. So how can I trust this book to teach me CSS that works for designing web layouts? I see that Eric Meyer has other products for CSS layout design but I would never consider buying one due to my experience with this book. I did enjoy the writing style and clarity of this book but I still have a lingering sense of distrust.

Help us learn CSS that works with the realities of dealing with browser capabilities!!!

You’ll be pissed if you code on a P.C. in IE6!
It’s all fine and dandy that Eric Meyers knows his stuff. This book will teach you CSS in Fire Fox, no doubt about it. But if you are coding to develop websites for IE, you’re going to want to toss this book out the window by the time you get to chapters 6 and 7.

How could the publisher put out a book without testing this cross platform and without previewing it in IE6? That’s asinine at best! At the very least put out a website as a follow-up to answer questions brought to your attention by your readers.

Example 1: How do you make the negative margins work in IE6 as discussed in exercise 4 of chapter 7?

Example 2: Why is the date aligned to the left in IE6 as discussed in exercise 4 of chapter 7?

Example 3: Why is the text in the footer not aligned perfectly in IE6 as discussed in exercise 4 of chapter 7?

Test your own product out again, Peach Pit Press. You’ve written a book without testing the product in Internet Explorer and that is just downright negligent at best.

What a shame too as this instructional manual is otherwise worthy of 4 stars.

Greate if you want a structured hands exercices
I found this book to be a great at providing a structured hands on experience through different features of CSS. I did all the exercises in the book on windows with firefox and they worked quite well. I did not try the exercise with other browsers. I was very happy that the author did not spend a lot of time talking about all the differences between browsers. Rather the author kept the discussion focused on communicating the most essential features of CSS, through the examples. I found the videos that came with the book to be helpful, and they complemented the text very well. The book does not spend a lot time developing the theory and all the details behind CSS, so I frequently found myself searching for more info on the net. The great thing about the book is the step by step hand holding nature. This book by itself is not enough to master CSS but it provides an excellent start, you will need to pick up some other CSS titles to complement this book.

CCS Web Design
Contrary to some other reviewers I use most of the time IE7 and book samples and exercises work excellent with this browser. Sometimes I use Firefox and this works ok, but it won’t let me revise the code. This is not a fault of book exercises design.From my "own" experience Firefox gives me trouble on JavaScript and Java web pages. But this is only me, and I dont blame either Firefox browser. I only try to be fair to this book.
Book lessons walk you steps by steps in the CSS sytle design. They are clear, succint and are excellent methods for developing web page styles.
I wish other authors write a detailed book like this in their subject.
I really enjoy each new methodology taught here.
I am looking forward to get similar book on JavaScript from same author or another from Lynda.com to sharpen my skills on this programming language.
CD with lessons and movies is very valuable
Thank you for your lessons
Joseph

Wow! The Quick-Time Tutorials Are Great!
This book’s quick-time tutorials and files are available to users of the Safari Online Library from Sams Publishing, so that is where I can across this gem. The tutorials are like sitting in class with a guru! You missed what he said? Back up 20 seconds and listen again. I manage content for a large local company’s site and I’ve seen several things demonstrated first-hand that I need to go back and fix, the easy way. Great explanations and demonstrations of such concepts as negative margins and dealing with collapsing containers, etc. Very highly recommended. Very practical. Even at full price - worth 50 times its cost.

only teaches you how to do one site
This book from cover to cover shows you how to do one website. You are pretty much starring at the same visuals the same time. Anyway, they tell you to do this and then that like all tutorial books, but they don’t really go into the concept behind it or what some alternative ways would be to achieve the same thing. I wwas eyeing this book for a while and after having done (half to be perfectly honest) I haven’t learned a thing. Or I guess not what I wanted to learn, which was how to do a layout with more than two panels that resizes with the browser.

Rigid Structure but Good Introduction
This book is a good way to learn CSS. The book is based on progressive lessons as opposed to just showing you the code for different techniques. Over the course of the book the goal is to keep working on one sample webpage and the idea is to follow along on your computer with included files on the CD.

I ended up just reading through the book without doing the lessons, and just focusing on what the new material did, as opposed to worrying about the sample page. I didn’t really like the lesson style, but after reading the book I feel very comfortable in CSS so the end justifies the means. If you don’t know anything about CSS, read this book.

Decent but not motivating
I’m new to CSS/XHTML though I’ve read "Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML" Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML (Head First) as well as "HTML, XHTML, and CSS; Sixth Edition" HTML, XHTML, and CSS, Sixth Edition (Visual Quickstart Guide).

In this book I really didn’t learn much (though I know it is designed for someone who knows very little) and I didn’t really connect with Eric’s writing style.

If you are looking for an excellent first book, then I’d highly recommend the Head First book as it was very informative and fun to read. It kept my hopes high as I try to learn and provided lots of examples.

HOT Training good--but this book is for beginners
I have greatly benefited from other Hands On training books on Flash, so I bought this one eagerly. However, when I got it I realized it was really for beginners and not worth tne price for me, so I returned it. This was not really clear in the description.

But if YOU are a beginner, this might be a great book for you--the H.O.T. series is the only one that helped me to learn Flash after many other attempts. Lynda Weinman’s teaching approach is really good.

I learned a great deal more about CSS from this book - especially in regards to overall page layout design
This is another very good book in the Hands-on Training line of titles from [...]. It steps you through a series of exercises using the supplied content files starting from the basic to the ever more complex. Each exercise and chapter builds on the previous as Eric Meyer has you change every little aspect of the demo website’s design and layout; the more complex aspects of the design that are taken for granted early on as he shows you the basics of CSS control over the website design (text, color, etc.) are slowly introduced as you work through the book. In the end, you will learn how to design an elegant website layout using nothing but the CSS style sheets; this approach is much more streamlined and less tedious than using tables to control page layout and design. With CSS 2+, no longer will this method leave your text hanging over its intended area!

As with all of the Lynda.com HOT titles, this one is well designed and easy to follow with every step illustrated - though I recommend following along by actually doing the exercises, the book is designed so well, that you could just read it and see the changes happen in the illustrations.

A couple of issues with this book (aren’t there always issues with a book like this - browser compatibility and the like?):

>>The demo website content will not display properly in Internet Explorer 6/7 - the only issue is the menu bar which shows up as a narrow line of color and the text is no where to be seen. I have encountered this before myself, and I would assume that the content of the book was worked through exclusively on a Mac (the author uses mostly Firefox, but occasionally Safari in his examples). This is a simple thing to fix by adding a `line-height’ declaration in the CSS rule.

>>There are a few typos in the book where values are reversed or some such - in one place, after using the values `50% 0’, he then tells you to reverse them and see the affects; this he should have expressed as `0 50%’, but the value `50% 0’ was repeated. A simple mistake, but be aware that a few exist and you will have no problem catching them as they happen.

>>The included video files are a bit lacking...most of them are a complete repeat of the content covered in the book before it suggests you watch the video for more detailed information. But, in most of them, no extra information - detailed or otherwise - is actually in the video. For those who are very visual in their learning experience, they can be helpful; but, the lack of them expanding on anything in the book is why I gave this book 4 stars instead of 5.

Overall, I highly recommend this book if you are looking to learn CSS from the ground up or improve your existing skills beyond table layout design.

Excellent Tutorial
This book is a real hand-holder, slowly leading you through the world of separating form from content. The author explains how to use CSS to control the appearance and layout of your pages, and why some choices are better than others. If you’ve felt challenged in your past attempts to learn CSS, this book might just be the breakthrough you’ve been looking for. As well as the best guide for self-instruction I’ve seen yet, "CSS Web Site Design Hands-On Training" would make an excellent textbook for anyone teaching CSS.

CSS Web Site Design H O T
If you are starting out with CSS or know bits and pieces, then this a great book for you. Like working in the real world, the most valuable experience comes from actually doing the work, which is why I suggest using "Hands On Training." Having all the files at your fingertips and being able to apply the knowledge in the book is the best way to learn. This book is so simple to read and can be completed in a short time. It is written for beginner - intermediates and I’d say it is a little more for the beginner, but definitely fits this category. As I have read elsewhere, it would have been nice to work on multiple projects and theories, but you can’t learn everything in one book anyways, right?

Worth waiting for!
I found CSS Web Site Design refreshing and full of tips and techniques for using css in web design. It is also an excellent review of basic techniques for experienced web designers. His writing style is personable and easy to follow. His processes for different situations were thought out and very systematic. An excellent beginning book. This would be a fantastic book for a beginning web design class. As an experienced web developer I valued the content. It was an excellent review.

What is needed is a few more chapters at the end covering:
1. various browser hacks
2. IE6/7
3. I would have prefered more fixed width sections.
4. a few extended (from scratch projects) similar to his other project based books.

Hopefully there will be a volume 2.

Found and Fixed what seemed to be a "Fatal Flaw"
Although there is alot to like about this book, there is a fatal flaw that needs to be considered by anybody thinking about buying it. Apparently the author wrote and tested the book entirely on a Mac, and it appears that the css was never tested under IE6/7 on Windows. Many variations of a single page are used throughout the book and unfortunately 1 small piece of the css used for the masthead and navigation menu simply does NOT work in IE6/7. The problem is some kind of a quirk in Internet Explorer because the css works correctly in Firefox and presumably on a Mac. Because the same page is used in several chapters the problem also ripples through several chapters. The problem is manifested whenever you try to match what you were instructed to do against the screen shot and what happens is that the navigational menu disapears - so your screen frequently doesn’t look like the snapshot in the book. I have submitted the problem to the publisher but because it affects so many parts of the book, the fix may take some time.

So if you are running Windows and are willing to work through the book using only Firefox then carry on because I think the material is worth it. And maybe the real value to the book is to challenge you and develop your skills such that you can figure out the workaround. But if you want it all clean and spelled out for you can only be patient.

Later... after the first pass at the review. I can’t seem to change the 2 stars to 4 stars which I would if I could. I found the answer to the Fatal Flaw. To give credit where credit is due, the pointer to the answer comes from "CSS The Missing Manual" by David Sawyer McFarland.

In several internal as well as external stylesheets and in multiple chapters, you are either instructed to enter "#masthead {background: #ABD240;}" - not including the quotes, or it is already in the style sheet. What you need to enter is "#masthead {background: #ABD240; line-height: 1.1;}" or change the already existing entry - again not including the quotes. This doesn’t change anything else on the screen but apparently fixes this IE6/7 idiosyncracy. With all this said, I recommend that you get this book.