This is THE must-own CSS book. At over 1000 pages, it’s not exactly enjoyable bathtub reading, but is anything truly enjoyable these days anyway? Yep! This book! It covers everything about CSS you can imagine, including full coverage of CSS Grid, which is going to change everything. O’Reilly also sells individual sections of this book as mini books and I purchased most of those months ago. Those are EXCELLENT for bath reading, btw. I’ve been wanting to take this book to the office to show my coworkers, but I’m worried I may end up too sweaty by the time I carry it up 5 flights of stairs. It is that impressive! When it arrived at my house, my wife literally exclaimed, “WTF is that giant book?!” and now the chair I placed it on has a permanent dent in the cushion. So far, I’m like 4 chapters in (yes, I’m reading it cover-to-cover like a Nicholas Spark book) and I already feel like I’ve learned so many new things about selectors, specificity, and the cascade that I didn’t know before and I’ve been writing CSS forever. You can literally just open this book to any page and learn something new.

I wish I could own this with a hard cover. I also wish I could shake Mr. Meyer’s and Ms. Weyl’s hands and thank them while also acknowledging the worn-down nubs that used to be their typing fingers.

Buy this physical book! You will not regret it.

Pro tip: buy some post-it flags while you’re at it because you are going to want to bookmark the heck out of it.

This 4th Edition of Eric Meyer & Estelle Weyl’s CSS book is very thorough and comprehensive. At over 1,000 pages, every topic that I wanted to study is included. I’m planning on using this new CSS book as a reference book so being able to locate specific topics fairly quickly is important. The Table of Contents is laid out in a very detailed format along with the page numbers. To find something, you can easily just look at the Table of Contents and then flip to the page. Also the book has a comprehensive Index that lists pretty much everything you’ll be looking for right there. As a test, I looked in the Index for some random topics and found all of them listed in the Index with the page numbers. The book includes 3 Appendixes.

Appendix A – Animatable Properties

The properties included here are the properties given in the CSS Transitions specification and are CSS2.1.

Appendix B – Basic Property Reference

Properties are listed by name and are in alphabetical order. Example, picked at random:

Property

word-break

Default value

normal

Value syntax

normal |break-all|keep-all

Inh

Y

Anim

Y

Appendix C – Color Equivalence Table

This table lists the Color Name, RGB decimal, RGB percentage, HSL and Hexadecimal for about 4 pages worth of colors. You can look up colors by name and it serves as a quick reference for finding a color code to type in your style sheet. Example, picked at random:

Color Name

lightgray

RGB decimal

rgb(211,211,211)

RGB percentage

rgb(82.7%,82.7%,82.7%)

HSL

hsl(0,0,82.7%)

Hexadecimal

#D3D3D3

The content included in this book makes it clear the authors are experienced web developers. I’m going to look through my other CSS books and discard some in favor of this new one.

Best and most comprehensive CSS reference out there. This should not be your starting point but after you get the basics of a concept, it is worth reading the relevant section carefully in order to grasp not only the "what" of a concept but also the "why" and "how" with examples to boot. For a reference guide, this book is very readable/enjoyable and is a must-have for anyone wishing to master CSS and getting the most out of it.

This guide is also very helpful if you are getting back into CSS after a hiatus and do not need the milk often given to total beginners.

I prefer the Kindle version because it is more portable (better than carrying 1000+ pages), cheaper and I can copy the code for the example (sometimes needs reformatting).

I am reviewing from the perspective of someone that has done web development for many years, but has only learned CSS in a piecemeal and ad hoc fashion - picking up the parts that I needed at any given moment in time, but not as a fundamental subject to be understood from the ground up. As of 10/22/17 I am over 100 pages in to the book and so far the content is excellent and deserving of five stars: it's comprehensive, strikes a good balance between terse and lengthy, and the examples are quickly understood.

I am docking one star due to two issues with the Kindle edition of the book:

1) There is no table of contents. This makes easily jumping to content of interest difficult, and is requiring that I fill my highlights with section headings.

2) There are formatting issues such as section headings not having margins, tables having odd alignment and wrapping (which breaks highlighting), note sections which look like they should be formatted differently but aren't, etc.

I would encourage the authors and/or publisher to work on these flaws and release an update. If such an update is released I will happily re-visit my review.

Delivered early and in great shape.

After looking through this book I feel "The Definitive Guide" is a very accurate description. The book is comprehensive and up to date.

The layout is accessible, the writing is clear and concise and the examples relevant and applicable to my everyday work.

I have been following the writing of this book through Eric Meyer's periodic releases of various sections as they were being written. Now I have the finished work in my hands I can honestly say the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts.

Oh, and I live on the other side of the planet from the authors and publishers and have had nothing to do with the writing or production of the book. I am just one happy web developer.

Extremely complete reference. Well organized. This is not a textbook to learn from (it is not organized like that). This is a reference book for someone who already knows a lot of CSS.

Why pay for this book when you can just look up stuff on the web? Good question. The answer is the material is explained here in a way that provides more depth, context, and completeness than it is on the best websites I use (HTML5Doctor, MDN, W3C, and W3Schools.) And while sites like CSS Tricks are great, they only work if the question you have has been covered by them. This book covers everything CSS.

Yes, it's worth the wait. With this book sitting here, I don't need anything more. Very complete, hugely expanded over the previous edition. I could use a better - longer, more complete - index, and cheat-sheet tearout cards, but that isn't the writer's fault. The author is, as is well known, a good, clear, thorough, accurate, experienced writer. I use it as a reference book and it excels because of its completeness. But it's written in a plain but conversational tone so it could also be used for learning CSS. I was suffering waiting for this to come out!

The book is good and in very detail.

Es habitual que se utilicen nombres muy presuntuosos en este tipo de libros, sin embargo, este sí hace honor al título: realmente es la guía definitiva sobre el lenguaje CSS.

Dos de las autoridades más respetadas en el lenguaje CSS te van explicando minuciosamente todos los entresijos de las hojas de estilos. La narración es precisa y detallada pero fácil de entender. Todos los puntos que resultan algo retorcidos o confusos están reforzados con un abundante número de ejemplos llenos de imágenes e ilustraciones.

El libro está muy bien estructurado. Se puede leer de principio a fin o saltar entre los capítulos a voluntad. Se incluyen muchas referencias cruzadas para ampliar información cuando se hace referencia a algo que ya ha sido explicado o viceversa.

Personalmente es un libro que me ha ayudado muchísimo a entender ciertos detalles y asuntos que siempre me daban problemas (aparentemente inexplicables, pero que no lo eran). Para cada capítulo, no hay nada que se quede sin tocar. Por ejemplo, los autores no dudan en utilizar unas 110 páginas solo para explicar las propiedades relacionadas con el texto y las fuentes. Pese a ello, como ya dicho, es relativamente ameno y no se hace nada pesado (si tienes interés en conocer los detalles, claro está).

Se incluyen aspectos avanzados como el flex box, grid layout, table layout, transforms, transiciones, animaciones, etc. Lo recomiendo a todo el que busque un conocimiento sólido y profundo de las hojas de estilo. No creo que se haya escrito nada igual. He tenido algunos otros libros de CSS y no servían para nada.

An amazing book from Meyer, as usual.

This book contains everything you need to know about CSS and it's explained very well, I can't recommend any other book about CSS more than this.

If you had the previous book (CSS 2.1) from Meyer you will find this quite different. This book contains way more examples and an easier language than the previous one.

Warning: This is not a beginner book. You can understand it as a beginner but the amount of information might be overwhelming

A great reference book.

je suis plutôt difficile au niveau des livres techniques, et celui-ci est un incroyable travail de digestion des documents de référence techniques correspondants à chaque fonctionnalité du CSS :

quasi exhaustif (à la date de 2017) avec des exemples très clairs, et tout cela avec une bonne dose d'humour.

On ne peut que s'incliner devant le travail des 2 auteurs. Si j'ai acheté cette édition en ebook,

j'achèterai définitivement la prochaine édition - que j'attends avec impatience - en version papier pour la garder sur mon bureau.