Before evaluating a review of a computer-related book, it's good to know the background or proficiency level of the person doing the review. After all, if a complete noob is looking for an instruction guide, they'd probably rather know how other noobs fared with the title instead of a seasoned professional. And vice-versa: if a veteran is looking for something that goes a few steps beyond their current level of proficiency, then it's nice to have another pro offer up their opinion.

I would consider myself a moderate or intermediate level computer user. I have a special backpack for my laptop, but I don't much care for lugging around an external mouse (if you see what I mean). I do some modest web development, am comfortable digging around code to fix problems, but don't really do any programming of my own. Recently I've had an interest in developing webpages using more stylesheet information. I hear the cool kids going on and on about this whole CSS (cascading stylesheets) nuttiness, and I don't want to be left out in the cold.

The new second edition of O'Reilly's CSS Cookbook, by Christopher Schmitt, caught my eye as an interesting title for learning some more on the topic. I had heard some good things about the previous edition, and generally find O'Reilly stuff to be well done. I'm certainly no CSS expert, but I have had occasion to dig around in it enough (through editing on other people's projects) to know I was interested in digging deeper. So that's me, and here we are.

CSS Cookbook takes a slightly different approach to presenting information than some of the other tech books you may have seen. Generally speaking, there are a couple of main categories they tend to fall under: textbook style, and project style. Textbook-style books work in a linear fashion, starting with the most fundamental elements of a topic and building upon them from there. Project-style books don't necessarily deviate from that, but they do work the information with a specific goal or problem in mind first, and then tailor the material to fit how you might learn from a real-world situation.

The cookbook approach is perhaps somewhere in the middle, although leaning more towards a textbook mentality. Information is divided up by topics (in this case, text formatting issues are together, image issues, layout issues, etc.). Within each topic, you will hit short “recipes” that seek to solve very small and particular issues. For example, setting an image for the background of the page is one recipe, and tiling a background image follows soon after. They're made to be short answers to common problems that you can look up quickly.

The plus side to this approach is that information on a particular question you have is gonna be about as easy to find as a dead-tree book can make it. The table of contents is very detailed, listing every recipe and a self-explanatory title for each. Not only that, but skipping around to just the information you need is made much more efficient than a project book could ever hope to be.