No matter how visually appealing or packed with content your Web site is, it isn?t succeeding if it?s not reaching the widest possible audience. If you get this guide, you can be assured it will! By deconstructing a series of real-world Web sites, author and Web designer extraordinaire Dan Cederholm outlines 10 strategies for creating standards-based designs that provide flexibility, readability, and user control?key components of every successful Web site. Each chapter starts out with an example of what Dan refers to as an ?unbulletproof? concept?an existing site that employs a traditional approach and its associated pitfalls. Dan then deconstructs that approach, noting its downsides and then making the site over using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). By the end of each chapter, you?ll have replaced traditional, bloated, inaccessible page components with lean markup and CSS. The guide culminates with a chapter that pieces together all of the page components discussed in prior chapters into a single page template.

No matter how visually appealing or packed with content a Web site is, it isn’t succeeding if it’s not reaching the widest possible audience. Designers who get this guide can be assured their Web sites will! By deconstructing a series of real-world Web sites, author and Web designer extraordinaire Dan Cederholm outlines 10 strategies for creating standards-based designs that provide flexibility, readability, and user control--key components of every successful Web site. Each chapter starts out with an example of an "unbulletproof" concept--an existing site that employs a traditional approach and its associated pitfalls. Dan then deconstructs that approach, noting its downsides and making the site over using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). By the end of each chapter, readers will have replaced traditional, bloated, inaccessible page components with lean markup and CSS. The guide culminates with a chapter that pieces together all of the page components discussed in prior chapters into a single page template.

Dan Cederholm is an award-winning Web designer as well as the founder of the design and development consulting firm SimpleBits. 

No matter how visually appealing or packed with content your Web site is, it isn?t succeeding if it?s not reaching the widest possible audience. If you get this guide, you can be assured it will! By deconstructing a series of real-world Web sites, author and Web designer extraordinaire Dan Cederholm outlines 10 strategies for creating standards-based designs that provide flexibility, readability, and user control?key components of every successful Web site. Each chapter starts out with an example of what Dan refers to as an ?unbulletproof? concept?an existing site that employs a traditional approach and its associated pitfalls. Dan then deconstructs that approach, noting its downsides and then making the site over using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). By the end of each chapter, you?ll have replaced traditional, bloated, inaccessible page components with lean markup and CSS. The guide culminates with a chapter that pieces together all of the page components discussed in prior chapters into a single page template.

Book Description
No matter how visually appealing or content-packed a Web site may be, if it’s not adaptable to a variety of situations and reaching the widest possible audience, it isn’t really succeeding. In Bulletproof Web Desing, author and Web designer extraordinaire, Dan Cederholm outlines standards-based strategies for building designs that provide flexibility, readability, and user control--key components of every sucessful site. Each chapter starts out with an example of an unbulletproof site one that employs a traditional HTML-based approach which Dan then deconstructs, pointing out its limitations. He then gives the site a make-over using XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), so you can see how to replace bloated code with lean markup and CSS for fast-loading sites that are accessible to all users. Finally, he covers several popular fluid and elastic-width layout techniques and pieces together all of the page components discussed in prior chapters into a single-page template.

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Guest Reviewer: Jeffrey Zeldman

Modern web design is user-centered, accessible, and standards-based. In other words, it’s completely different from the stuff we did in the 1990s. There are two vital aspects to designing with web standards:

(1) understanding why
(2) knowing how

Know-how is what Dan Cederholm has in spades, and in this updated edition of his essential text, he shares that knowledge with humor and clarity.

Dan’s is one of the smartest minds in CSS and HTML. He is internationally known as a deep and innovative coder. But his background is in design and production, working on real-world sites for no-nonsense businesses like Google, ESPN, and Fast Company, Inc.

This grounding in practical user interface design and daily production issues makes Dan a great teacher of CSS, because he never loses sight of the things designers want to do (not to mention the things designers’ clients and bosses demand of them).

From multi-column layouts that stay crispy in milk, to maintaining fine control of web fonts and sizes without alienating users: just about every problem a modern web designer faces is examined, with solutions ranging from good to better to best.

This second edition includes everything you need to know about taking Internet Explorer 7 into account. Little else has changed. And that’s as it should be, for this book is a classic. It belongs on every web designer’s shelf.

-- Jeffrey Zeldman, author, Designing With Web Standards 2nd Edition

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About the Author
Dan Cederholm is a Web designer and author living in Massachusetts. He’s the founder of SimpleBits, a tiny design studio. A recognized expert in the field of standards-based Web design, Dan has worked with Google, MTV, ESPN, Fast Company, Blogger, Odeo, and others. He embraces flexible, adaptable design using Web standards through his design work, writing, and speaking. Dan is the author of two best-selling books: Bulletproof Web Design (New Riders) and Web Standards Solutions (Friends of ED). Dan also runs the popular weblog SimpleBits, where he writes articles and commentary on the Web, technology, and life. He also plays a mean ukulele and occasionally wears a baseball cap.

No matter how visually appealing or packed with content your Web site is, it isn’t succeeding if it’s not reaching the widest possible audience. If you get this guide, you can be assured it will! By deconstructing a series of real-world Web sites, author and Web designer extraordinaire Dan Cederholm outlines 10 strategies for creating standards-based designs that provide flexibility, readability, and user control—key components of every successful Web site. Each chapter starts out with an example of what Dan refers to as an “unbulletproof” concept—an existing site that employs a traditional approach and its associated pitfalls. Dan then deconstructs that approach, noting its downsides and then making the site over using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). By the end of each chapter, you’ll have replaced traditional, bloated, inaccessible page components with lean markup and CSS. The guide culminates with a chapter that pieces together all of the page components discussed in prior chapters into a single page template.

A good book but...
Some useful tips on creating good semantic markup. However, the author tends to build his case for this markup by citing tables on a lot of examples and the arguments to switch to a DIV structure. In some ways, I found this amusing as most of us know the benefits of table-less designs. The book reads more like a story telling similar to many technical analysis stock chart books I read based on past hindsight that no longer is relevant.

I bought this primarily to read about the indestructible box example. But I have to say after reading this that the markup is too narrow in scope. Not every box is going to have a DIV followed by an heading tag to create the rounded corners. Not only that but it was a fixed width example too so how can this be "bullet proof". Rather, the author should have come up with a generic solution so that the box can be sized width wise and lengthwise. Many people use a CMS and the markup to create a box is different.

All in all though its a good book to follow along to see how one goes about doing actual design in CSS. There’s very few books out there like this that teach design while taking a hands on approach.

Recommended but...
Most of the solutions are very good but the "problems" behind quite a few of these are non-existing or not important at the most.
The rest of the subjects are OK and if you are prepared to skip about 1/3 of the book I can recommend it.

Very practical and offers excellent practices
I have been a so-called "table monkey" and have been longing to become a human being. So I picked up this book.

Throughout the text, the emphasis is placed in creating an XHTML/CSS page that does not break, when the user environment and/or the browser setting are not what the site designer expect or anticipated. At first I was a little skeptical of the author’s rather strict adherence to the design that does not break in situations such as, say, a user uses a very large font setting for better readability; such a consideration may be of little importance nowadays, since even Firefox 3 now "zooms" in and out the entire page contents by default, not just text fonts. Furthermore, for many web developers under pressure to produce web sites that just work "well enough" for most reasonable cases, it does seem like the practices that are recommended in this book seem to take a little more care and time than desired.

However, all the design ideas presented in this book are very well thought out, and it actually does not take much extra effort to implement, once a designer gets used to them. I am in the process of updating my web design skills from what I knew as a table monkey, and I assure that this book offers plenty of enlightenment to those in similar situations as I am. Good thing is that once I learned the techniques presented in the book, I can come up with other effective ways to use CSS to fine tune layouts. Using HTML tables still offer some advantage if you need to support older nonstandard-compliant (Microsoft) browsers, but the flexibility of CSS just cannot be beaten if the site designs require extreme attention to detail.

The only drawback is that the presentation of the XHTML/CSS codes is slightly too meticulous and verbose for someone who is already very proficient in reading them. It is also not a cheap book for the amount of contents. Highly recommended, especially considering that the good CSS support in most modern browsers has started allow us to transform ourselves from table supermonkeys to CSS subhuman.

Best CSS Book I have ever owned
This is easily the best CSS book I have ever owned. It’s very easy to read and provides excellent, and sadly few, examples. Most importantly, the author does a wonderful job helping the reader understand concepts and how and why certain things are implemented.

Other books are FULL of examples... although they usually lack the details that someone like me need. The details, writing, and illustrations make this book much more attractive. Sure, Bulletproof Web Design isn’t the end-all of books of this nature. It’s short. You’ll need more books. But any serious developer needs to read this book.

If you like "Don’t Make Me Think" by Steve Krug, then you’ll adore this one as well.

Good book/Wish It Worked for Some things
I purchased this book in the hopes it would have fixed my floating issues. It did, to a point. A couple of the examples didn’t work well with Firefox. I found this book was helpful to fix a few things, but I did find that I was able to find other fixes online. I still enjoy this book, I just wish it worked better with Firefox browsers.

You need this book
I have to say that I’m suprised at one reviewer saying that it was confusing.Not at any point did I find it confusing.This book is a very very good example of how to write reusable bulletproof code. Obviously the code supplied from the website,as with ALL coding books, is not quite the same as the written examples, but hey! the point is that YOU write the code,not cut and paste.And yes he does point to others websites as examples of how they can be improved with DECENT code,bloody right, there’s far too many people still writing sloppy xhtml and css,with sites that belong in the dark ages.Get with it! and get some standards.

Best CSS book yet
This book is very readable, and the examples are presented in building block style, step by step. Practical benefits of XHTML and CSS are provided, and the code needed for the samples to work in the major browsers. I highly recommend the book!

Firefox users only need to apply
After building enough sites from scratch, and wanting to make darn sure they were browser friendly and accessible, I got this book due to it addressing cross-browser problems and techniques for accessibility.

Now the practical knowledge in this book is great. It’s the no-hold-bars dirty hacking of CSS/XHTML to force it to work in browsers, and address how to get sites to be more accessible (like addressing text sizing that scales accordingly in IE 7 and FF, and to look similar in each browser). Added benefit it even shows you how to tweak the Blogger Tic-Tac template, to be even better -- for beginning bloggers, this is very sweet.

But, I learned that this book is geared to the 10% of the web browser market (Firefox), which meant code examples to experiment with weren’t friendly to IE 7. Worse, the code explanations were quite elementary -- dictation/narrative style -- which didn’t give me enough info to know WHAT I was doing. Efforts to tweak examples (like in Chapter 4) required over an hour trying to get the floats to not break, if I resized them -- all because the explanations were so scant to know what variables to tweak.

Really wanted to like this book, as it’s tailored for two main headaches in web design (cross-browser friendliness; accessibility tweaking) that’s not often covered in other CSS/(X)HTML books. Alas, the search is on for a CSS/XHTML book that is truly cross-browser friendly. :/

One of the best CSS books out there
I am very skeptical about the value of IT related books. Having been in the industry for 17 years I have read very few that deliver what I am looking for and instead have tended to rely upon articles from disparate sources across the web.

There are of course exceptions - and this book is a shining example of how to make a subject understandable for many levels of experience AND be of value to all.

If you are interested in making your site CSS friendly, want to unravel what all the various things mean, or have a working knowledge of CSS and want to go beyond what most average developers know about CSS then I would strongly recommend buying this book. It won’t solve world hunger, but it will solve many of your CSS questions and designs.

written in a voice anyone can understand, filled with techniques pros use
The second edition of Bulletproof Web Design is as good as the first, but keeps it current with IE7 and the ever-changing techniques CSS professionals use. The book is written in a voice anyone can understand, and is filled with techniques pros use. The lessons don’t go that deep, but there is little here that anyone who writes CSS for a living will disagree with. I was surprised that he still talked about adding hacks to your CSS to feed special values to different versions of IE, but in the last chapter ’Putting It All Together’ he used external hack sheets for different versions of IE brought in with IE conditional comments, so all was forgiven. I would recommend this book to anyone who desires to improve the way that they write CSS.

Helpful
This book is great. Sets you up with examples of web sites that real world major companies have created, and will walk you through a better way to do specific parts of the site.

Mind experiment
A good tech book is one I can take with me on the train, read it, gain something, and then try out the technique once I get to the office. In other words, it lets me perform experiments in my mind and then try them for real later. Too many tech books fail to logically walk me through a process and instead either (a) rely too heavily on complex examples that must be done on a computer or (b) regurgitate existing documentation.

_Bulletproof Web Design_ avoids both traps, instead making a case for accessible design and then explaining - in easy-to-understand chunks - how to do it.

To put it another way, very few books in this genre succeed in changing the way I approach something. This one does.

Book Review from Silicon Valley Web Builder (SVWB)
This is one of the best CSS books I have read. Author demonstrated how to make the sites bulletproof on desirable features like adjustable text, scalable navigation, expandable rows, and sizable boxes. Unlike other CSS books, author demonstrated standards-based strategies for building designs that provide flexibility, readability, and user control with useful code examples, ample illustrations, and clear explanations. This book changes the way on how we treat CSS and HTML from the old traditional concept to the cutting-edge practice in any modern browsers, yet making successful sites degrade gracefully in any browsers. This is a good reference book I would keep using and reading repeatedly. This is excellent classroom book for CSS beginners to build strong foundation or advance professionals to push their skills to the next level.

Not for beginners, shows real world examples for sure
The book is very well written for me. I know enough CSS and XHTML, but I get lost in the WHY to do certain things in certain places. The book has some great example websites built with tables, and then how the same site could be improved with XHTML and CSS. It is not a simple replace A with B. He takes you through each step, why he is doing it, and what the effect is in the browser.

I enjoyed it so much I read it all in a single day. And for the past 2 weeks have been going through and implementing his tactics on a new site I am building. It is very practicle advice to put into your sites today. It has definately helped my understanding of CSS in general, and even provides some good site design tips as well.

I highly recommend the book.

Excellent Foundation
I found this to provide an excellent foundation for developing web pages using lean HTML and elegant CSS. It was not overly focused on Web Design or Web Development, but comfortably in the middle. The examples were progressive, practical, and timeless. In addition, the final chapter brought it all together nicely to make a full web page from scratch.

This book really is 5 stars! I gave it 4 stars only because I wanted more examples and, as a developer, I would have preferred more code.

Nonetheless, an excellent guide into the next generation of web development. Something I will reference again and wish I had read years ago!

For web standards professionals to improve their skills.
If you’re a frontend engineer who’s already skilled in web standards (semantic markup, CSS presentation, unobtrusive javascript), this book may help you to the next level. If you’re new to that stuff, then I recommend Head First HTML With CSS and XHTML.

Excellent book for intermediate web designers
A best practice CSS & XHTML book aimed at the intermediate-advanced web designer. If you’re a beginner looking to learn CSS web design I suggest you look at The CSS Anthology or Web Standards Solutions books first, then come back to this book to polish your skills.

The book dives straight into common approaches to everyday techniques. It makes an explanation as to why it may not be the best solution and suggests `a bullet-proof approach’ and justifies its reasoning. The book is one of few with colour illustrations which is nice and makes for clearer example images. The book concludes with a chapter demonstrating all the examples in a single website. There are some good techniques in this book and there’s bound to be something new even for the seasoned CSS web designer.

Bulletproof - no bull
This book is simply essential for the serious web developer who cares about standards and web sites that just work. It is well presented and thorough. The knowledge it imparts is readily extended to new design challenges. Well done!

No brainer. Definite MUST-HAVE.
I hope knocking down to 4 stars doesnt hinder people from buying this book, it is fantastic and should be in every web designer’s library. Its concise, filled with well-explained and well-illustrated CSS strategies. The author’s writing is one of the best I’ve ever seen in a technical book. Fun to follow and a great sense of humor, but very clear about what he’s teaching.

I knock it down a star for two reasons, one it does focus a bit too much on people with screen readers. I know this sounds awful to say, but before I get crucified let me explain: as a designer my medium is mainly visual. While I do think it is important to keep your audience in mind for general public sites, I think for a design book the visual should be a bigger focus only because as designers we are trying to "wow" clients visually.

The other knock is that it is fairly small for a list price of $39.99 but price is an issue I have with most computer books. I would’ve maybe also like to see a chapter or two of random Tips & Tricks. Stuff like making text look weather-beaten by putting a GIF of "splotches" over it that I recently saw online. Maybe that’s too gimmicky for this book, but you get the idea.

Despite the knocks this is a must-have CSS book and should be a definite purchase for all web designers out there. One of those you will come back to over and over.

Heads up on quality of the book cover
Book content is excellent, but be prepared for disappointment with the paperback cover. It is not glossy and unlikely to hold up to regular handling. Plan on covering it with something reinforcing. In fact, the cover on my book also started curling within hours of unpacking it, before I even did more than flip through it.

New Riders is not the only publisher who seems unable to put a good cover on a paperback, but it mystifies me as to why that is, since so many publishers have no trouble with that aspect of book design.

The design bible for Web 2.0
I bought this along with Dan’s other book, "Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook" last year. It has been a constant companion since and really gave me a strong understanding of how to use CSS in some incredibly intelligent ways and avoid all the horrors of tables for layout. His approaches for fluid designs are particularly smart and I loved working through the examples and using the examples myself. A must-own book if you have any interest in web-design.

A must for every serious web designer
I don’t use to thoroughly read professional books from start to end. I rather browse them for solutions to specific problems I encounter.

Well, in this case I’ve broken my habits, because from the very moment that "Bulletproof Web Design" reached my hands, I made it my bedside (or better, my "bus-seat") book and I’m about to finish it already.

Dan Cederholm just covers 8 (+1) aspects of designing with web standards, but he does it so well and so easy to read and understand, that you learn much more about the foundations of CSS than what the chapters announce.

Congratulations, Dan. And thanks a lot.

Not For a Beginning CSS Student
I like the style that the book was written in and the building approach to a final piece of code. Too often books will take fragment pieces of code to describe several different functions and then lets the reader tie all of the pieces together. Okay for someone who is knowledgable but a nightmere for a person new to web design. This book assumes that you have prior knowledge of XHTML and web design. Being new to this language I did not understand many of the issues described in the book. One point that did come out loud and clear is that the industry desparately needs a set of standards that everyone adheres to.

It appeared that the main issue the book was trying to resolve was that of the visually impaired. While this is important the focus should be on general web design. Also, while the examples started off great and very well presented too many off shoots were addressed like shading of blocks, rounded corners for boxes, etc. These items make for great looking web designs but they should be discussed in a separate book as this took away from the main topic that was being addressed.

This is my first attempt at writing code for a web design and I must admit I find CSS difficult to learn. Bullet Proof Web Designs helped clear some things up but there still are many lines of code that don’t work the way I thought they would so I continue to search for additional resources that presents a clearer path to good CSS web design. However, that’s probably why I’m called a beginner.

Exactly what I was looking for
This book is exactly what I was looking for. Instead of giving you fish, it well... it gives you some, but it teaches you to fish as well. This book, unlike other HTML/CSS books I looked at, gives you *direction*, helps to understand why certain things are better be done a certain way.

Using software programming as analogy, this book does not teach you C programming, like loops, variables and pointers, but rather shows you examples of elegant software designs, with bits of C langauge here and there.

It is very short and easy (very easy) to read, but somehow it finally twisted my mind, and "HTML generation" process is more fluent and natural (and less annoying) now.

Get the bpwd-code.zip (code for this book)
Someone was complaining that he couldn’t find the code for this book elsewhere. I happen to find the code for this book based on the filename of the zip file that was mentioned here. Grab it before it is gone!!!

[...]

Great web design pointers!
This is definitely one of the most useful books I’ve found on CSS and XHTML. I liked the author’s mantra of keeping the content separate from the design and going for maximum flexiblity. Great examples and very easy to follow steps. Each chapter concentrates on a specific aspect of web page design, with the last chapter sort of tying it all together. I only wish the book was longer - maybe Cederholm will write a Vol 2 with more. One aside - after reading this (and others) and noting all the various issues with the Internet Explorer browser (i.e. how much stuff it gets wrong), it makes you wonder if any of the folks at Microsoft would even admit in public to having worked on the IE 5 or 6 projects...

Awesome, Critical Book for Good Web Design
This is a must read. There are so many great ideas for building scalable pages. It’s also written in a style that ANYONE can relate to even for people who are relatively new to XHTML/CSS. This book makes a great companion to "Stylin’ with CSS" by Charles Wyke-Smith. It fun too.

A page-turner
One of very few technical books I could not put down. I devoured it from cover to cover. Packed with practical, extremely useful information.

Good overview of CSS best practices
I like the style of this book. It’s got a nice graphic look, and the writing is easy to understand and has a friendly tone. The examples are laid out very well - new code is highlighted with red text, which is very helpful. I really like the approach of gradually adding more elements to CSS, explaining each as you go. And finally, I like the overall structure, which is to explain the "standard" way of doing something, then explain why that’s not the best approach, and then to present the "bulletproof" way of doing the same thing.

However, I’m not sure I buy the author’s suggestion that it’s imperative to move from old-style HTML markup to a CSS-oriented approach. His main argument is that there is usually less code, and it’s easier to read a page using a cell phone, or some other non-browser device. Also, he feels that users should be able to change text size in their browser, and the page should smoothly adjust to that.

This is all true, of course. Smaller code is easier to read (which is helpful only to the developer), and it does download quicker (although most of the bandwidth consumed is usually graphics and the like, not HTML). Certainly it’s a good idea to structure a page so a blind person can read it using a special device. And finally, it’s a nice thing to be able to adjust the size of the text on a page.

On the other hand, there are still many problems with using CSS so it works across all browsers. The book describes many workarounds, but to me, the fact that you need these workarounds really raises the question of whether it’s "better" to switch to this new style. It’s a question each developer will have to think about.

Excellent How-to guide!
Bulletproof Web Design tackles some of the common design problems on modern websites. Each chapter takes the approach of defining a problem, usually in the context of what was wrong with the old table-based, inaccessible approach, and showing how to implement it using CSS and XHTML. The book is very readable. The examples are concise and clear and with plenty of pictures.

Topics covered:
- techniques for defining boxes with rounded corners, that can be made expandable
- planing for accessibility by organizing the page logically and allowing the text to be resized without making the page look bad
- using floats to achieve grid-like appearance (instead of tables)
- handling vertical expansion
- fluid layouts

I also recommend these books on CSS:
Accessible XHTML and CSS Web Sites Problem Design Solution and CSS: The Missing Manual

Excelent CSS book.
This book has a lot of good reccommendations for modern use of stylesheets. I really enjoyed the author’s style, presenting the A B C apporach of solving a problem and explaining the strengths & weaknesses of each approach. There needs to be more books like this one on the subject. This is a very good buy for anybody into web design or css design.

Good designer’s perspective everyday use of CSS
Having previously completed reading Simon Collison’s excellent "Beginning CSS", it was refreshing to jump into a book that I could get through fairly quickly (no offense, Simon).

The most valuable thing I learned from this book: It showed me how easy it is to throw a CSS hook onto pretty much anything in my XHTML, so it really freed up my thinking with regards to the flexibility of CSS.

I made my own graphics for all the exercises because I learn better that way - anyone with at least a beginners knowledge of Photoshop, Fireworks or similar program will not have a problem doing the same. There is a zip file containing all the code and images somewhere on Dan’s site, called bpwd-code.zip, but for the life of me I can’t find it again anywhere online or I would share the link with you. [I find it ridiculous that New Riders, the book’s publisher, doesn’t have a permanent place for folks to get at it.]

I would recommend that anyone new to CSS reading a book that spoon-feeds you the basics before reading this one. At the proper stage of development, however, this book is an excellent stepping stone.

Bulletproof Web Design: Improving flexibility and protecting against worst-case scenarios with XHTML and CSS
This book is an easy read and has a lot of great tips on enhancing code.

Superb easy to read book!
I used this book in conjuction with my course at University and it really helped me.

This is an easy-to-read book which, unlike most computing/website design book is incredily dry, nor does it have a soporific effect on the reader! Quite a change from most.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone. It is supberb, and has a flexiably structure that allows you to jump from place to place in the book, if you feel a paticular chapter is of interest to you.

Fabulous!
This book/author is simply fabulous in its capability to provide an almost componentized approach to the presentation layer of a website. It demonstrates how to build flexible and fast-loading web pages by minimizing the amount of markup code/html. Further, by abstracting much of the presentation code, using medium to advanced level CSS, economies of scope and scale could be had through reuse of the remarkable and substantive techniques presented in the text. Great Work!

Wonderful
His work really is bullet-proof. I’ve spent time playing with what he has in a variety of browsers, changing my text sizes on those browsers, etc...and this CSS is hard to break.

For those looking to take a basic knowledge of CSS to the next level, this is a great book. Basically, I had finally gone from table-based layout to CSS. While my work has been getting better, I think this book really helped me move it a step further. His practical examples are especially useful.

Very good book on CSS
This is an excellent book on CSS. The title is a little misleading, as it is really about creating bulletproof web designs using CSS. It does not address any of the myriad of other topics that would make a site bulletproof like security, XHTML, web servers, application servers, etc. etc.

If you don’t know what CSS is yet, then this book is certainly not for you. If you are looking for a basic getting started book on HTML, with a little on CSS I would suggest the VERY excellent Elizabeth Castro book, now in its sixth edition entitled "HTML, XHTML and CSS, sixth Edition" a Quick Start quide, of course available on Amazon.

Dan Cederholm’s book "Bulletproof Web Design’s" is a good companion to other more basic books, once you know that you want to use CSS to format web sites, and have a clue how to use it.

The one problem I have with this book, is that it _only_ provides the CSS. There is absolutely no HTML anywhere, which makes looking at examples a litle tough. The graphic illustrations of the results look great, the examples are useful, well explained and in a logical order.

This is certainly one of several books to have around when creating a modern web site with HTML and CSS.

In fact, it can be a good companion for those who both hand-code sites, and use professional tools like Dreamweaver.

So, as a CSS book, I give it 5 stars, as a general bulletproof web design book, I give it 3 stars, because it really has very little content about the other relevant subjects.. But, I’ll be fair and rate this as a CSS book, title notwithstanding, and give it 5 stars.

Hands on and straight forward
The book is very helpful for web designers and web developers that are not "CSS masters" like me. I know a lot of CSS, but it is not my core expertise and often done by others with me doing only the development part of the website (the basic html, dynamic content and database integration).

It shows on very real examples the mistakes you can make, the consequences of those mistakes and solutions for how to do it right.
Being busy with solving other problems, people like me tend often to forget about the fact that there are different browsers with different settings are used by people and that your screen resolution might only be the resolution which is used by a fraction of the people using the Internet.

This book brings those issues on the table and provides straight forward and easy to implement solutions for those issues that save you time trying stuff yourself, only to run into new problems again.

I wish I would have bought this book much earlier. It would have saved me so much time and headaches.

Great, but
overall this book is awesome, well written, with good common use info.
i think that it needs an introductory chapter though, for those who don’t really know CSS yet but are buying popular books to learn.

Conceptos solidos, limpios y claros, aunque no muy tecnico.
El libro se enfoca más en conceptos aunque abstractos, importantes y bien ejemplificados sobre el porqué un diseńo debe de ser a prueba de balas. El código es limpio, sencillo y dan la base a conceptos muy puntuales que son pilares para un desarrollo web portable, compatible y optimo. Sin embargo, no profundiza mucho sobre el CSS como lenguaje, y variaciones a algunos ejemplos presentados hacen que se deba buscar el porque de repente ya no funcionan. Lo recomiendo como un buen libro para formarse un criterio solido sobre diseńo web.

Beware - You need to ALSO know Photoshop
I was disappointed - not because the CSS stuff is poorly presented, because it’s on the better side of average, but because to learn this book’s stuff, or try to emulate some of the examples, requires a knowledege of Photoshop. For example, you need to know how to create an image with a gradient applied to a canvas, or to create a 1 pixel transparent row within an image - something that your average person may takes weeks to learn on his own. Photoshop is not all that intuitive to just grab a copy and simply create an image that the author uses.

And the author’s website to support the book lacks the images we could use - just to get through with the book’s examples.

By the way, the images the author uses do not even specify their size, so even trying to recreate these images augments this inherent problem.

Great book but missing a page
Great resource for css designers. I particularly enjoyed the section on rounded corners and css without tables. But I did find one thing wrong with it--page 196 is missing from my copy. What happened?

Essential For All Web Designers
Dan Cederholm’s second book is a must-have for all web designers. This is essentially a ’cookbook’ that uses a problem and solution approach to solve oft-encountered situations (such as creating navigation tabs). Each chapter begins with a new situation and the ’old school’ (tables, spacer-gifs etc) way of doing it before explaining why this is wrong and then constructing a step-by-step bullet-proof solution. Bulletproof basically meaning that the code is more flexible, accessible and easier to maintain. This mainly involves trimming down the XHTML markup to its bare essentials and then adding everything else using CSS.

Dan’s writing style is very easy to follow and the presentation of the book sets new standards for this type of book - full colour, glossy paper means that all the code examples are easier to follow and there are some excellent diagrams and screenshots.

Highly recommended.

Recommended
I’m on chapter 3 of this book and I love it. Its easy to read due to authors language and prose, its all colour and very enjoyable.

I read other reviews on this book thoroughly (also on Amazon.com site) and this helped me decide this was the next book to go for.

One question I didn’t wasn’t sure about before buying the book was just how skilled in XHTML and CSS I had to be as this book is Intermediate/Advanced (as stated on the back cover). Well, I would recommend that you know the basics of CSS such as defining lists using < UL > etc. The author jumps straight in to solving niggly cross-browser problems and so won’t explain how padding and margins work etc.

I would say its also good to experience some of these problems that web designers encounter such as text not resizing on IE when it does on Firefox, probelms creating scaleable site navigation menus and so on.

It is a cookbook. I found it handy to be typing some of the CSS into Dreamweaver just to see exactly what was going on. Athough I was a bit peeved at having to go and get the laptop at first, it did improve my overall understanding of the problem in the end.

In conclusion: This book tackles common issues in a logical manner and does indeed attempt to make them Bulletproof. Recommended for people like me who have been working with XHTML / CSS for a little while but need to tackle common problems properly.