If you're going to read Designing w/Web Standards, you'll get a very very good head start with CSS. You may be able to get by for a while just using what that b

If you're going to read Designing w/Web Standards, you'll get a very very good head start with CSS. You may be able to get by for a while just using what that book teaches. But, I actually really recommend at least skimming through parts the CSS2 spec. There are more human-readable passages than you might expect. Specifically: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/cascade.html http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/cascade.html Most beginner CSS devs don't really understand how inheritance and the cascade work (it isn't necessarily last-rule-wins, it's based on selector specificity). This part of the spec spells it all out. http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/box.html http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/box.html http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/visuren.html http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/visuren.html These are easily the two most important pages of the spec. If you understand these, you'll be able to take away 90% of the mystery and guesswork that can go into laying out a page. Nearly every time I've seen a developer struggling with CSS issues, it's turned out that they've had an imperfect understanding of the basic concepts that are spelled out here. And for a technical spec, these pages are amazingly readable and understandable.