tags with identifiers (id or class) and that's it. While this visually helps the designer quickly create the site, to screen-readers, or PDAs or cell phones may not render the page exactly as you may think it should and using semantic markup helps the browser for that particular device render that page that makes the most sense. It is a hard concept to grasp or fully explain (as I probably am not), but it is used more and more in current web practices.

Now this book is written by a couple different authors which seems like the norm nowadays. [...] They all have contributed to various blogs (including their own) about web design techniques and many of them are here in this book.

Now the title of this book may be misleading. You do not have to be a professional web designer using XHTML and CSS in the workplace to buy this book. Nor do you have to have memorized every CSS property and value to understand what the authors are saying. All you need to be able to grasp the concepts talked about in the book is a basic understanding of Cascading Style Sheets. As long as you know the basics, this will be a very enjoyable read. The reason it is called "Pro" I am guessing is that many "pro" fessionals use the same techniques and practices that are talked about in the book. It doesn't mean that it is so complex and intricate that only the select few will understand.

So to start out the book goes into an excellent explanation (of what I started to in the beginning) of what semantic markup is, why it should be used and practical uses for it. The book then (chapter 2) goes into quick summary of CSS basics but from a perspective of why each element and style should be used (semantic meaning) and some of the least understood properties and selectors. The next chapter goes into a great explanation of how the "cascade" part of CSS works with using descendant, child and adjacent sibling selectors. This is a difficult concept to grasp and the author(s) explain it very simply and easily for almost any level of reader. Lots of code snippets and examples here with great uses for everyday stuff. The next chapter (chapter 4) is skipped in many other CSS books but is a very important issue: browser differences. This chapter explains each browser's (Firefox, IE, Opera and Safari) history and incompatibilities with CSS 2.1 and CSS 3.0 standards and discusses some of the big issues that started "hacks" back in the early years of CSS development. Hacks themselves are discussed in chapter 6 and are a very valuable skill in creating designs that are consistent across browsers. Though the author(s) explains that hacks are much a reason of non-semantic markup as they are with browser incompatibilities.

CSS layouts (chapter 7) and common page elements (chapter 8) are great chapters to get your website started with good design ideas or help you redesign your site without tables.
Some of the techniques shown are: rounded corners, image swapping and hover effects, creating tabbed navigation, and styling a logo image. Another concept explained in detail that gives most people headaches at first are floats which are used extensively in layout design and creating properly aligned forms without tables.

Another great chapter (chapter 10) focuses on layout designs for styling tables. Although there are a lot of examples on the web on how to do this it makes it easier to find it and apply it to your own site.

This is a great book for anybody wanting to further their CSS knowledge and experience by learning techniques that are used by some of the top designers out there. A must buy!