If you’re looking to learn CSS, Eric Meyer on CSS is a great place to start. Eric Meyer has long been considered one of the top CSS gurus on the web and while he’s been known to have strong opinions, he’s also very practical without being dogmatic about the use of CSS. He’s got a deep curiosity of how different browsers implement CSS and every now and then finds something which surprises him; I find the browser blog entries his most interesting.

This book is based around ten CSS projects for which you can download the files. You change the project’s file throughout the chapter and can check your work against final versions which are included. This book was popular enough that a follow-on book was released, More Eric Meyer on CSS.

The projects progress as one moves through the book although they’re independent of each other; you can pick and choose which chapters to read. The first chapter is especially good since it walks you through how to take a table-based layout and change it to use CSS. Another chapter is dedicated to print styles and how they can be effectively used.

I think the success of this book is due in no small part with how Eric has chosen projects which show you not only how to do CSS, but why it can be a good idea. Some of the examples are a bit dated by now since the book was released in 2002 (and More Eric Meyer on CSS in 2004), but that doesn’t detract from what Eric has to teach.

Since the books were released, Eric has been a part of the very successful An Event Apart seminars, which I highly recommend. They center more around design, but Eric does dip into the technical side of the CSS pool.