Sorry but I'm skeptical.
If you could prove this by sharing a paragraph or two (should be all it takes, right?) teaching how to use CSS to build reliable layouts I would be grateful.
I suspect what he meant was that you can come up with a simple layout with 10 minutes of reading, but that's a strawman. The real problem is that it's extremely easy to rapidly make a once-simple layout a nightmare to maintain or debug.
With bitter experience I've realized I need to be extremely disciplined when I use the CSS directives margin, padding, and float. Everything else is relatively straightforward, with localized implications. But anytime you mess with the box model itself you really need to think about the big picture of your page's layout.
Dan Cederholm wrote one of the best: http://simplebits.com/publications/bulletproof/
However, a book is a very different investment from "maybe ten minutes of reading a how to guide".
http://www.maxdesign.com.au/articles/css-layouts/
It was written in 2002. Cross-browser layouts are a "solved problem" :)
After that I think the quoted statement works.