This tutorial is an introduction to CSS and is part of a web development series. It is recommended to have a solid understanding of HTML before proceeding with CSS. The tutorial will use notepad for now, but an editor will be used eventually. CSS stands for cascading style sheets and is used to add style and formatting to HTML documents. It allows complete control over the appearance of webpages without changing the HTML. An analogy is made using a fence, where the HTML is the unpainted wood and the CSS is the paint that adds style. The same analogy can be applied to a house, where the HTML is the structure and the CSS adds style with paint, fixtures, and decorations. The tutorial then proceeds to show how to do some CSS by reusing source code from a previous HTML tutorial.