CSS Mastery for me is THE book on CSS. Although its old because at the time the book was written, IE7 was not officially in the market yet. It contains a lot of step-by-step solutions for common real-world css problems, along with browser gotchas and hacks when necessary. Particularly useful if you plan to support IE6 for pixel-perfect layouts.
Heh, never even knew there was a book for http://www.csszengarden.com/ (or was it that the garden was for css zen), still I probably got the most from doing little zengarden mock-ups; ya know sort of like a time-trial. . .[ramble]. . .Coming to back to the web to the without tables was probably my biggest hurdle, but doing enough stuff in the spirit of zengarden really helped out.
These day though I find myself having a harder time getting inspired to start something fresh in Photoshop than anything in my text-editor. Once you stop thinking and developing in terms of a graphics editor you will start seeing and thinking in terms like this, how do I want my user to interact with this document?
I honestly couldn't really recommend a book though, CSS doesn't necessarily require a text to understand how to format a hyper-text document, other than that, I don't think there isn't much else I could recommend besides just dive into an xhtml document and start formatting your view according to something that catches your eye on the web.
Seconded. Instead of the usual dry "Chapter n: Divs, Chapter n+1: Links" etc, Zen of CSS looks at a number of stunning designs in turn, explaining how each was achieved.
Bulletproof Web Design is the only CSS book I have liked enough to buy so far. Hopefully, our peers have other suggestions. I would like to learn more.
HTML with CSS and XHTML by Elisabeth Freeman & Eric Freeman seemed like a breeze to get through, and very easy to understand. I recommend starting here. But who am I!
The definitive book is Designing with Web Standards. Not all CSS per se, but it is requisite reading if you're just getting into the whole CSS-based design thing.
That book goes hand in hand with Eric Meyer on CSS.
CSS is such an evolving art - browser inconsistencies and their related hacks are constantly changing, and best practises are continually being developed.
It seems ironic to me that you would revert to using dead-tree media for instruction on how to style the cutting edge. If you simply need an introduction to css then w3schools can't be beat.
Oh, and I also own zen of css design, which is pretty good if you must have a physical book.
Not a book, but I would highly recommend a web dev. plugin for Firefox such as Firebug that lets you view CSS attributes on every element in a page, as well as edit the CSS and see live changes.
Handcrafted CSS: More Bulletproof Web Design (Rough Cuts)
Flexible Web Design: Creating Liquid and Elastic Layouts with CSS (Just released)
Trascending CSS (Released)
Learning the Yahoo! User Interface library: Develop your next generation web applications with the YUI JavaScript development library (Released, for yui and some javascript)
All but one of those (the yui one) is available on Oreilly's Safari bookshelf. ~$40/month is nothing to scoff at but if you're in an intense learning period, I find that it is a no brainer (you don't need to agree to more than a month).
CSS: The Missing Manual was a great starting point for me. I still use it as a reference but I mostly just find things on the web. Smashing Magazine has some good stuff -- http://www.smashingmagazine.com/category/css/
I think you mean Eric Meyer and the book Cascading Style Sheets, The Definitive Guide (http://meyerweb.com/eric/books/css-tdg/). I really like this book and highly recommmend it.
It hasn't converted me into a CSS fanatic, but it has helped me learn the tech and write better CSS when needed.
