If you were to ask me to tell you the focus of CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions, I’d tell you that it’s mostly about working around browser differences. Where that other web standards book (which I highly recommend) focuses entirely on writing clean XHTML and CSS, this one gives you a hand with all sorts of ways to talk to one or more browsers exclusively to specify some extra rules. It’s a good resource, and while I strive for fully compliant markup and styles, I’m glad I have it at my disposal.

At every turn, you’re reading about how a certain feature doesn’t work in Internet Explorer. Sometimes, there’s a workaround. Other times, you’re glad you know about a cool feature that you won’t be able to use until Microsoft gets their act together. It’s a little frustrating. I can’t really blame the author, Andy Budd. I want to be able to use these features now, and I imagine that he is just as frustrated as I am. Ultimately, just like the early release of Flex 2.0 with Actionscript 3, it’s extremely cool to learn and become experienced with features before they become widely available. One of the chapters covers some cool advanced CSS selectors, such as one that lets you target HTML elements with specific attributes, that will allow some interesting style manipulation.

Andy covers a lot more information such as list styling, form styling, creating navigation tabs, and fixed, liquid, and elastic page layouts. You’ll also find some good examples of drop shadowing, rounded borders, and two case study chapters to finish off the book. With all these design trends and several mentions of changes expected with the release of IE7, you’ll find yourself in a very modern perspective that covers web design concepts and issues that will affect us today.

Many of the other ideas Andy presents were already in my arsenal, but if you don’t have a web design book in your library, this would probably be a decent choice. Personally, I’ve never looked into the browser hacks, but CSS Mastery puts the important ones together in one place. Sure, you could probably find them through Google, but I find it easier to have them all in a book that I can just reach for when I need it.