2008-05-28 Essential for any would-be CSSers

Having spent many years building sites using non-CSS markup, I've been aware that my skills are increasingly out of date, but have been scared off CSS by its scary reputation (plus my lazy unwillingness to unlearn one markup style and learn a new one!).
After wasting a few weeks with hopeless online tutorials, I bought The CSS Anthology and within a couple of days was building simple, effective pages without resorting to table structures.
That's how good this book is: the author asks and answers the real-world questions that any web editor/developer cares about. The result is that you're so busy solving dozens of small problems (eg:how to create a 3-column layout) that you're soon learning the principles and practicalities of CSS without even realising it. Best of all, the book contains code fragments (downloadable from a dedicated website) so you can easily create working solutions before you get the confidence to tweak them.