At the beginning of the year Friends of Ed sent me a book to review. I'm pretty sure the publishers have forgotten or given up hope of ever getting a review out of me, so it must be time I wiped this off my to do list.
The book is: Getting Started with CSS by David Powers. As the name suggests it is aimed at people getting started with CSS and with only basic HTML knowledge. It's hard to imagine having any knowledge in HTML without at least some CSS knowledge as they go hand in hand these days.
The book builds your understanding without over complicating tasks, or confusing the reader and covers all that is needed in clear simple terminology. It includes helpful examples and exercises which can be downloaded, and allows the user to experiment with different values. The contents are clearly listed and could be used to learn or solve specific tasks as needed.
If you are self taught then this book may cover areas of CSS you have not looked at before or fill in the gaps of your knowledge. It includes a handy properties and selectors appendix, which you would expect in any reasonable CSS book.
Getting Started with CSS doesn't go into CSS3, instead it looks at styles and techniques that can be used today, with the browsers of today. It points out where browsers such as IE6 will have problems and explains how to work around them.
Overall it's a clear well written book that would be helpful to anyone learning CSS and useful as a resource to solve specific web style issues.
