Dreamweaver is the software that eases the construction of websites by providing for "what you see is what you get (almost)" construction. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a web building tool for separating content and format in web site design, making the updating of sites easier and taking up less memory space on the host computer.
This book attempts to teach the reader how to use Dreamweaver to create sites that use CSS. After a chapter laying out the fundamental rules for CSS, the authors provide a number of tutorials including building a new style sheet (the repository of the CSS rules), migrating a table-based layout to CSS, using liquid and then elastic CSS layouts, and finishing using a combination of Dreamweaver and Spry, another web design tool, to create a site.
The book says it's aimed at the Intermediate/Advanced level and based on my experience, I guess that I'm at the Beginner level. I've constructed table-based websites with Dreamweaver that work well and look good. I understand the fundamentals of CSS. But this book left me in the dust. In the first tutorial, the authors took me step by step through the process of using Dreamweaver, telling me exactly which menus to use and which submenus to fill in, and though I had to refresh my memory from time to time by looking at (X)HTML and CSS texts, I was able to complete the tutorial. But as the authors moved to later chapters, the instructions on using Dreamweaver became less and less specific, so that by the half-way mark, the reader was being told what code was desired without any handholding through the menus. For an occasional user like myself, it was just too much and I soon found myself flipping back and forth, and using menus even though I had no idea why I was making the selection. My problems were compounded by the fact that these are long tutorials, and I sometimes had to look back hundreds of steps to find a place where I had made an error that had an effect on the present step.
I don't want to suggest that I got nothing from the book. I got enough from the first tutorial and the early sections of subsequent tutorials to edit my main site to incorporate some CSS rules. I'm not certain it was worth the effort for me. I've spent months working my way through this book.
If you are experienced with coding and understand CSS and all of Dreamweaver's menus, and you want to use Dreamweaver to speed up the construction of CSS, this book may be just for you. For the less experienced user like me, a beginner's guide to CSS and Dreamweaver is needed.