It was wise of Osborne to add the phrase Programmer’s Reference to this book, as it sets the scene for its approach to presenting its subject—CSS.
      Designing web sites extensively using Cascading Style Sheets has only recently really become possible, and even then variable support by the current generation of web browsers ensures a degree of unpredictability.
      Cruise on over to A List Apart and read their series of articles about the trials and tribulations of redesigning the site with CSS, and you learn there are still a few hacks and workarounds that must be applied to overcome certain browsers’ limitations.
      The current CSS situation though is nowhere near as bad as all the hacks we had to resort to during the HTML-as-page-layout days. All those paragraph-level font tags, endless single-pixels GIFs stretched to fit whatever space needed stuffing, and tables within tables within tables. A few minor bits of dodgy CSS coding are nothing by comparison. If you link your HTML files to an external CSS document then that is the only file you need touch to make sitewide page layout changes. Now that is efficiency.
      Soon enough, we hope, the major and minor web browsers—Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, Konqueror, iCab, Opera—will all fully explore both current versions of CSS—CSS1, CSS2—before the W3C ratifies CSS3. Until then now is the time to bone up on CSS and to use as much of it as you can.
      The only barrier to that is access to the knowledge. There has been less than a handful of CSS books released. In fact I have only come across this one and another by O’Reilly & Associates so far. That is a shame, as neither book is the ultimate answer.
      Both books are aimed more at programmers and coders than visually-oriented designers. Neither contains anywhere near as many illustrations as they need. In fact, Cascading Style Sheets 2.0: Programmer’s Reference has no illustrations at all. A reference it is—it lists all the properties and all the values of CSS2. It also tells you about property interactions and common errors made by HTML coders.
      But it is not the CSS book I think we really need. That is the kind of book that might be written by Eric Meyer in association with other people who have been hacking away at the coalface, like Jeffrey Zeldman and his colleagues—the kind of people who have simultaneously been agitating for browser makers to adhere to web standards and struggling to do the best they can with what adherence currently exists.
      Now that would be a reference book, one ideally suited to the real world of compromises, botch-ups and band-aid measures.

The Book:

• Title: Cascading Style Sheets 2.0: Programmer’s Reference
• Authors: Eric A. Meyer
• Publisher: Osborne/McGraw-Hill
• Publication Year: 2001
• Pages: 334
• Illustrations: None
• ISBN: 0072131780
• Rating: 3.5

• Part I: Reference
• Basic CSS Concepts
• Values
• Selectors, Pseudo-Classes, Pseudo-Elements, and At-Rules
• Visual Media Styles
• Paged Media Styles
• Aural Media Styles
• Part II: Summaries
• Browser Compatibility
• CSS2 Quick Reference
• Useful Resources