As another primarily back-end developer, of all the programming and scripting stuff CSS is truly the most brain damaged. Most of what I've seen is making CSS w

As another primarily back-end developer, of all the programming and scripting stuff CSS is truly the most brain damaged. Most of what I've seen is making CSS way more complex than it needs to be - part of it is thanks to years of general browser incompatibilities causing people to put in "dont go there" warnings or for the sake of compatibility of X stuff. Second would be various tools and frameworks that may have been partially implemented in some other peoples' teaching of CSS. I would say these two books cleared away a lot of the muck for me: Stylin' with CSS by Charles Wyke-Smith - very concise. I also found bits in Handcrafed CCS by Dan Cederholm to be good as it worked on either bad styling or no styling and how to clean up stuff or achieve a good effect CSS wise. After that a lot of Googling, examining pages that worked, and reading how to do x, y or z as well as just trying stuff out myself till I get it right.