This is a good book for illustrating the elegance that can be achieved using CSS for design, and it offers some general principles for basic design and CSS implementation. It is not, however, a technical book or a step-by-step, how-to manual. You won't find any information about CSS syntax or any other detailed technical information. If you already know the basics of CSS and want some conceptual hints for improving layout and design, this is a nice place to start.

Not exactly the how-to on CSS layout I was looking for, but still worth a skim if you are looking for inspiration for new layouts.

This is a good crossover book - a little bit of CSS for designers and a little bit of design for nerds trying to understand the concepts. No great revelations to be had, but it is pretty.

An interested read, but not universally usable. The examples make good designs for a graphic designer's blog, but just aren't useful for e-commerce, tutorials, forums, etc. (just picture Good Reads using any one of these layouts). There's even one layout that scrolls horizontally. It (and the site) are great for showing the potential of CSS since all designs use the same HTML code but look radically different, but it's not where to go to learn CSS.

There are some good tips regarding the use of color and space, however the code examples are getting very out of date since the book is 11 years old. It talks about XHTML (which was dropped in favor of HTML 5) and doesn't use CSS3.

Over all, a good coffee table book to give your web designer friends, but that's about it.

Ha ha! I have a whole stack of these.. anyone want to be my reading buddy? :)

If you want to learn to design web sites with css this book is a must have.

Since I'm a frequent visitor to the excellent CSS Zen Garden web site, I purchased this book hoping that it would enlighten me regarding the technical implementation of some of the more advanced CSS designs. Unfortunately, I think the book just misses the mark. What you get is a brief six page explanation of a particular design concept for each of the 36 included designs. This is all good, but I was hoping to see at least a few of the very advanced designs completely dissected in explanation, from beginning of the source to the end. Intermediate CSS coders will undoubtedly pick up a useful technique or two. Still, it's a good book that could have been great.

Great for design insight and CSS tricks

I loved the website and the sneak previews on Amazon made me want to buy this book, it is sometimes good to have a hard visual reference when learning something new.

Even though it was written in 2003 some aspects of this book our out of date, for example it still references IE6 as not being able to interpret some CSS (of course we are now up to IE9) - it also lists Dreamweaver as a Macromedia product, unfortunately Macromedia has been mostly gobbled up by Adobe who know owns DW.

Although there are some good reference points and ideas, I was a little disappointed that most of the sites the have as examples rely on long vertical scrolling, again maybe a sign of the times. In internet terms 8 years is a millenia.

Still a nice book for my library and I have tabbed numerous pages with stickies for quick reference lookup.

This book dives more into design than CSS, and is pretty dated. Web technologies and standards evolves so quickly that this outcome is expected.

The design lessons taught in this book is still relevant. With regards to the technical details in the book, it is a great history lesson, and a reminder of how far we have come so we do not make the same mistakes, be it for the CSS community, or when it comes to having a standard in any other aspects of the web (and beyond).

A very good walking in the web design world

Not for beginners! Though this would make a great step for intermediate CSS users. Lots of clever hacks and work-arounds all taught with visuals that really speak to the more visually inclined, like designers. Definitely one I'd like to keep on a programming reference shelf.