Good book

This book has really fine tuned my arsenal and widely broadened my understanding of CSS. The book has several nicely organized sections and comes with files that allow you quick references and opportunities to play with the code for a better understanding. Case studies at the end of the book are a great companion for putting all the things they throw at you too. My favorite part of this book was the CSS organization files that are ingenious. To sum up the book in a few words, CSS galore!

Not a fast read and the coding can become somewhat difficult to understand if you're not willing to stop and think through it. But come out of this book with half your sanity still intact and you'll be creating websites like the pros. Well, I can't guarantee you that much, but at least it gives a better understanding of bugs and hacks so you wont have a headache when testing across multiple browsers. That alone is worth much more then thirty bucks.

Requirements: Before you pick this up, make sure you have a basic understanding of XHTML and CSS 2.0 or higher (the book concentrates on 2.1). A little Javascript (not a must) wouldn't hurt for a few files they throw out to you at the end.

Didn't give this five stars because it's in black and white. Come on, this is supposed to be a coding book for a visual art, no excuses for it not being in color.

Outdated (2006). This is what happens when you leave a web dev book on the shelf unread for too long... ;-)

Correct, neat, simple.
For the geek inside of me, this book accomplish what it promise.

A little aged, but worth the time.

Advisable.

A great guide for beginners and advanced users of CSS. Andy Budd demonstrates his mastery of the art of CSS styling throughout the book, in bite size simple to understand and combine chunks. A must read for all web enthusiasts.

the book that made me a decent frontend developer. very good for the time it was published.

still siting in my e-lib

An aging but still relevant old standard. There's a lot of focus on cross-browser hacks that will be of little interest to the designers of today, as most of these hacks have been encapsulated in frameworks or are simply no longer relevant for most use cases. Additionally, the two case studies are showing their age. But, overall, still excellent.

This is an awesome book esp for daily tackles w/browser compatibility and standard compliant issues. At my job I keep this book by my side at all times!

A lot of experience, but some are out of date.

I am already really familiar with CSS but this book really takes it to the next step. Really easy to follow with great case studies. I highly recommend the friends of ed books, http://www.friendsofed.com/ for web designers.

Although it sounds like a cliché, "CSS Mastery" is an excellent book, from the first to the last page. Most of book is written by Andy Budd, with Cameron Moll and Simon Collison contributing with final two chapters.

As easy as it is to find lot of content on Internet that would educate user what can be done with CSS, there's something special to have a book to articulate concepts from beginning to end providing a consistent narrative of the thought and methodology behind some technique's implementation. That is exactly what this book is providing.

Covering everything from the basics of marking up documents properly by using clean, semantic and valid (X)HTML to the advanced CSS tips and tricks. The foundations of CSS are explained as well along with ways to resolve browser bugs on which web designer can run into. Authors will teach you how to style forms and data tables, how to use lists to able creating visually appealing content.

PDF file with errata is available for download from the book's accompanying website where also sample chapter, the table of contents and all the code included in the book can be found.

For the couple of times at least during the read I was happy to realize "...how something works" or "...that's the way they done it" so whether you're new or experienced to CSS for sure you will also find this book useful.

Chapter 1 called "Setting the Foundations" addresses usage of meaningful markup, using classes Vs. ids, different versions of HTML and CSS, DOCTYPE among other things.
Chapter 2 called "Getting Your Styles to Hit the Target" discusses selectors, specificity, inheritance, style sheet planning and organizing, and style guides.
Chapter 3 called "Visual Formatting Model Overview" discusses the box model, differences with IE, positioning (relative/absolute/etc.) and floating.
Chapter 4 called "Using Backgrounds for Effect" discusses using images for list bullets, various rounded corner techniques (including border-radius), multiple background images, opacity (including RGBa), drop shadows and image replacement techniques.
Chapter 5 called "Styling Links" discusses all sorts of interesting ways to play up links, including creating CSS-only tooltips.
Chapter 6 called "Styling Lists and Creating Nav Bars" discusses all the various proven methods of creating CSS-styled navigation, but also includes excellent section about Flickr-style image maps creation.
Chapter 7 called "Styling Forms and Data Tables" discusses calendar styles and what markup can be used to make various layout methods for a simple form.
Chapter 8 called "Layout" discusses how to create fixed, elastic and liquid layouts, explaining the bonuses of each one.
Chapter 9 called "Bugs and Bug Fixing" discusses how to find and isolate bugs, reminding user to "...fix the problem, not the symptoms".

The final two chapters, tenth and eleven are the case studies for sample sites "Roma Italia" (by Cameron Moll) and "Climb the Mountains" (by Simon Collison). Both authors walk through their approach for site building and the implementation of various techniques. Both case studies serve as professional models for reader to be able to learn from and experiment with.

The book's only minor drawbacks should be addressed to some outdated data because of book release date, more color highlighting for code differentiation would be more than welcome and some content overlapping can be seen because three authors were part of this writing project. But all of these drawbacks are so minor comparing to all good things provided, although I wanted to mention them.

As verdict, I will quote Andy Budd who with sentence "...There are an increasing number of CSS resources around, yet you only have to look at a CSS mailing list to see the same questions popping up time and again." greatly summarized this book. The material contained here user can find somewhere else for sure, but if you're in a search for a handy collection of advanced techniques, you'll get that and much more from this book.

Probably this is the best book on the market for this subject, huge recommendation.