I purchased this book the day it came out and was very excited to see a detailed book on HTML thats not over 3 years old. To date Ive read 4 diffrent books on HTML\CSS and this is the best one yet. But there was one thing I was disappointed in not seeing.

John Duckett went into good detail on the FONTS properties in CSS. But he failed to mention that diffrent computers Macs, PC, Unix have diffrent fonts and that users should pick a common font from each system that they like. While I dont own a mac and cant know for sure I have been told that fonts like Arial, Verdana, Tahoma are not standard mac system fonts.

Those aren't Mac fonts. A similar Mac font is Helvetica.

So you'd declare your font as:
body {
    font-family: Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, Helvetica, sans-serif;
}

If you don't have access to all three platforms, then generic fonts are your best bet. Though given all the *nix variants, one *nix platform may not have the same available fonts as another. From my own experience, they've been consistent. Generic fonts are always available though (provided the browser supports them, many do).

sans-serif (Arial, Helvetica)
serif (Times, Times New Roman)
monospace (Courier, Courier New)
cursive
fantasy

http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/fonts.html#font-family-prop

In my own research I've found serif, sans-serif and monospace to be the most consistent.

HTH!


Regards,
Rich

--
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That's why you should always put a generic font at the end of each CSS font code.
In his more recent book, Beginning HTML, XHTML, CSS, and Javascript, he does explain that.