What is are the best resources your recommend for learning CSS considering that I already have a background in programming and some basic knowledge of CSS.
Two books that helped me the most were:
Stylin' with CSS: A Designer's Guide by Charles Wyke-Smith
This is kinda dated but does good on getting the basic structure down with a little bit on how CSS makes pages look better.
Handcrafted CSS by Dan Cederholm with Ethan Marcotte
This goes more into improving styles and how to get things working better and simpler CSS.
Both are showing their age but the approaches work for the programmer brain (more-so than books written for those who don't know programming logic at all.) Once you get these basics down, you will be able to understand what's going on when you look over googled results of what things you want to do. (and see how badly overloaded a lot of commercial sites are)
Still gonna take you months, but hopefully it won't be as frustrating as when I started trying to figure it out.