This small book of little more than 100 pages has a very provocative title. Most 
likely in order to increase sales. And, as you probably suspect, the title is very misleading. Most of what you know about CSS is right, even after the arrival of CSS2.1.
And the book actually doesn’t address most of the topics of CSS at all – it’s mainly about various CSS display properties that create a table layout appearance. More than 95 of the pages address this. The thing that’s new and which I guess motivated this book is that finally Microsoft Internet Explorer, with the release of version 8, supports these CSS 3 properties (or, actually, CSS2.1).
So far, most CSS layouts have been created using positioning and floats. Either approach has problems that need fixes and make the designs relatively complex. The new CSS “display: table” instead gives you a table layout with a few easy lines of CSS.
The book gives you concrete examples of how to get up to speed with these CSS3 properties and explains CSS properties such as table, table-row, table-cell, table-row-group, table-header-group, table-footer-group, table-caption, table-column, table-column-group. It also takes a fast run-through CSS3 layout techniques such as grids and multi-columns.
To me this book is an introduction to the topic, but not an in-depth treatment. The sample code is very, very simple. And at times it is annoyingly light. For instance, it is very easy to build conditional style syntax into a CSS table design so that it degrades gracefully into a HTML table design for earlier versions of Internet Explorer not supporting CSS2.1. The authors, however, do not go into this. This is pretty disappointing and reduces the usefulness of the book. IE6 and IE7 are still probably used by 40-50% of web users, so unless you support them better than this book proposes you may be in trouble.
Everything you know about CSS is wrong is a book about CSS tables I would recommend for beginners, and only until some better book with wider coverage comes along.

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