Anne Kowalski

If you're a fan of Sitepoint books, you'll probably like this one as well. It has the same easy, fun reading style as well as the high-quality full-color graphics. The targeted reader is someone with advanced beginner to intermediate CSS skills.

It is more of a cookbook/reference/tutorial style book rather than an in-depth manual to CSS. This is both good and bad. I find it mostly good because it covers the most common tricky CSS design scenarios (rounded corners, backgrounds, forms, tables, etc). But at the same time, it can be difficult to modify the existing examples because they are so specific to the design situation described. Once I took the time to sit down and work through the examples, removing the extras, I figured out how to modify the examples for just about any situation.

One thing I really like is how the authors wrote standards-compliant yet IE-friendly code. I'm finding myself needing to use conditional comments and separate style sheets less and less ever since working with this book.

Something else I liked was how graphically complex and attractive the examples were. This, along with the Zen Garden, definitely shows how attractive and flexible CSS is as a presentation language.

All the code examples can be downloaded from the book's website.