computers and internet

Wanna learn CSS with a beautifully illustrated, simple, and technically accurate tutorial book? Look no further! Eric and the review team have crafted a wonderful book on CSS.

Why would you buy it?

1) CSS is the next step up in web design. It's fluid, flexible, can make your pages load faster, and can be MUCH easier to work with than screwing around with tables and placeholder images.

2) It'll make your page more appealing to people and search engines.

3) This is a tutorial book. You can get a reasonably good handle on CSS if you are not already an expert.

4) It not only walks you through the exercises in words but presents visual representations of what your example pages will look like.

5) Lots of books accomplish #4 to some degree but this is an oversized color volume, which makes it much easier to work with.

6) New Riders makes good stuff. They are consistently one of the best publishers along with O'Reilly and this book is no different.

There is no "quick reference" in this book for all the CSS markups you will learn in the tutorials and the index could have been a little bit better. There were a couple little things that didn't seem to work perfectly, but 99% of the time the exercises turned out perfectly. Other than those few things, this book is about as good as it gets.

In the nature of fair disclosure, New Riders provided a complimentary copy of the book for review a couple of months ago. It has gotten and will continue to get plenty of use.

"Eric Meyer on CSS" is one of the first and only books on CSS to take a real world and hands-on-teaching approach to CSS. You will learn CSS and how to apply it to real world situations, which helps to re-enforce what you are learning. This book will guide you through a series of well thought out projects that show you how CSS and can be used to solve problems. The book is in full-color, which makes it fun to read. Eric's writing style is very approachable and conversational, which makes you feel comfortable. His tips on browser bugs and gotchas are worth the price of the book alone!

You should have a solid understand of basic HTML and web design principles before you read this book. But once you are ready to learn CSS - make sure this is a book you don't pass up! In a market flooded with technical regurgitations and theoretical pontifications, it is so refreshing to see this kind of approach taken with a subject like CSS. There is just no better way to teach CSS!

As a fellow author and Web developer, reading this book was not only informative but very engaging and entertaining! This book should be part of every Web designer/developers curriculum. Do I have any complaints? Nope, I just wish there was MORE of it!

After all that I've read about Eric Meyer, I must admit I was left wanting after reading this book. The experience reminded me of certain teachers I had in college: very bright, knew what they were doing, but did not know how to effectively convey their knowledge to others. For instance, his erratic use of varying units of measure within the same CSS rule - usually without explanation - goes against most all professional design convention, making the resulting code both difficult to learn AND difficult to maintain (VERY confusing for subsequent Web technicians needing to modify the work).

Buy the book - but buy it USED.