Book: Eric Meyer on CSS

Smart guy, but too formulaic

This book wasn’t put together in a way that work for me. It was all about re-creating his examples in order to learn the techniques of CSS. If that style of learning appeals to you, than this is probably an excellent book to learn from.

Even though I didn’t end up using it much, it was clear to me from Meyer’s writing, particularly his factual margin notes, that he’s extremely knowledgeable and communicates well on the topic. I suspect that I would find his other books on CSS useful. However, this one was much too formulaic for me.

I find this interesting since the Bulletproof Web Design book that I enjoyed so much is also based around examples. But those seemed much easier to adapt and use as needed for similar projects without actually following along step-by-step to re-create his examples. Now that I’ve read some of Dan Cederholm, Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer, I can see the variation in approaches. I’m not yet knowledgeable enough to know which approaches are best, but since all of these guys are associated with one another I suspect they are all good and that the variation is just that. Perhaps at some point I’ll pick up the O’Reilly CSS book that Meyer wrote or one of his other “cut and dried” CSS books.