Over the past year, I have seen CSS become more important. Shortly, 8 months ago, it became a necessity as a web design tool. Unfortunately, I've been so busy that this is the first chance that I have actually had to sit down and learn it.

I do hope it's not too late. You wouldn't think so, but I am seeing signs that I have been left far, far behind, now.

I've caught a few tags & tricks here and there, but I am now about to design my first site completely in CSS. I've bought "core CSS" as my main CSS reference book and "Web Design in a Nutshell" as my quick reference to everything, "How to do Everything in Dreamweaver MX 2004" because I was ticked about not having a manual for DwMX (and "How to do Everything in Macromedia Flash MX 2004" because Flash MX didn't come with a manual as well).

I use Dreamweaver MX 2004, Top Style 3.10, various text editors, Photoshop 7, and a whole host of other tools (including pen and paper) to design my sites.

I've spent considerable time looking for really good CSS tutorials online. What I've seen was quite literally SAD. It seems that everyone thinks that copying and pasting the W3C CSS rules and providing a couple of insignificant examples is good enough. So I went out and bought the books.

As I read, I get more confused. It seems that I can use DIV, SPAN or BOX? I can set a backgound or do z-axis positioning with z-index? Wild. Then you look at all this and you wonder which is best. Which is most appropriate for which circumstance. Which uses less memory, which method loads quicker? And then you have "Layers". What the blankityblank are layers, the reference books don't mention them, just Dreamweaver (and Dreamweaver books). The reference books only seem to hint at a very miniscule fraction of these questions and provides absolutely no answers (other than each tag and what it is supposed to do and the Browser capability for each tag).

I need real world design solutions. I see that what I really need is a CSS for Designers book. Can anyone recomend one or two? While I do appreciate the reference books, I need to get going and as I read the reference books, more questions are raised and never answered.

I am trying to create a very small site to start out. If I just ran it through Photoshop and let it go at that, I'd have the interface template done. I add some text content and wala, a site. But that is not what being a web designer is all about. There are plenty of other issues to address.

Have you been to www.saila.com or www.thenoodleincident.com ?

I referenced both sites when I built my own. The idea was to build a site withou tables.

Truth be told, my favorite book has been O'reilly's "HTML & XHTML the definitive guide"

It has a section for CSS.

I didn't really get into CSS until about 9 months ago. Now I would say it's one of the most important things I know (except my name and things). If you need any help with CSS, I'm sure one of the guys (or gals ) or I could help you!

www.davesite.com
is a very easy to understand sytax and history tutorial for begginers with css