Category: Books

After more than a year of work, I’m absolutely proud and delighted to introduce my first book: The Book of CSS3. As well as the prosaic title, the subtitle — A Developer’s Guide to the Future of Web Design — should give you some idea of what to expect from it: it’s a book written by a developer, for developers; in other words, by me, for you.

The book doesn’t aim to teach CSS from scratch; it presumes that you’re a working developer with a good knowledge of web technologies, especially CSS, and you want to take your knowledge to the next level. It aims to translate the sometimes complex specification into something that’s easier to understand, and has plenty of code examples and illustrations to aid in achieving that aim.

It’s not a book of step-by-step techniques, it’s for keeping at hand to use as a resource; and as such, I believe it’s the first book of it’s kind on this topic. There are plenty of books available which teach you about the exciting visual elements of CSS3 like animations, border radius, and so on, and while my book certainly covers those areas it also goes deeper into looking at new layout methods and what we can expect to see in the future.

If you’re a regular reader of my blog you should find plenty in the book that you’ll enjoy; many of the more popular posts I’ve written, such as Using Media Queries in the Real World or CSS gradient syntax: comparison of Mozilla and WebKit, have been adapted for the book in one way or another.

If you’d like to read a sample the publisher has made available a PDF of Chapter 6: Text Effects and Typographic Styles.

You can buy The Book of CSS3 direct from the publisher, No Starch Press, as either a print copy with free eBook (PDF, ePub or Mobi), or eBook alone. You can also order the print book from many online retailers including Amazon UK and Amazon USA.

There’s a companion website with examples and resources from the book, which I aim to keep updated so that it becomes a constant online reference guide; with browser implementation of CSS3 changing so quickly it’s inevitable that some references in the print book will become outdated in the long term, so the website should go some way to combating that.

I’m anxiously awaiting the first reviews, although initial feedback has been promising. I hope it’s popular not only because I put a lot of time and effort into it — the sense of achievement I have from writing it has been worth all of that effort on it’s own — but also because I believe it’s a book that will be of great use to many people. (I know, I would say that!)

I hope you’ll forgive a little self-promotion, as I’d just like to play a few quick notes on my own trumpet. The latest issue of Net magazine is now on sale, and features a tutorial article, Create A Dynamic Content Panel, written by me.

In the article I explain how to build a dynamic Contact area, as we did on our recent redesign of Preloaded.com, using the Web Storage API and the BBC’s Glow Javascript library.

I’m not sure what the rights situation is with this article, but I hope that at some point in the future I’ll be able to post it here on my blog. But in the meantime, you can buy a copy of Net magazine in the UK at all good newsagents, as the saying goes (I don’t know if it will be in overseas editions also).

On the subject of print, I’m also currently writing a book about CSS3 which should be published later this year. I’ll have more information on that nearer the time.

I work as an Information Architect / Developer, and I’m a big fan of comics. For my IA work I refer frequently to the work of Jesse James Garrett, especially his Elements of User Experience book, and as a fan of comics I recently read (again) Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics.

I’m not saying that to boast of my geek credentials, but to introduce something I never imagined I’d find: a connection between the two.

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I’ve just finished reading John Allsopp’s book ‘Microformats: empowering your markup for Web 2.0′, and thought it deserved a review here — marked up, of course, with hReview. I was given a free copy at the recent Microformats vEvent, but hope that hasn’t coloured my review at all. Markup for the review was generated by the hReview creator (and slightly modified by myself).

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As you may be aware, I write for CSS3.info every now and again. Joost, the brains behind the site, rewards me for my work by sending me the occasional web development book; I’d do it for free, to be honest (don’t tell him that, please), but it’s a nice little bonus.

The latest book I’ve received is The Art & Science of CSS by Cameron Adams, Jina Bolton, David Johnson, Steve Smith and Jonathan Snook. The subtitle — Create Inspirational, Standards-Based Web Designs, sums up very nicely what it’s all about.

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CSSeasy.com’s Q&A says:

Q: Why do I need this site?

A: ‘Cause you don’t want to read CSS books of 500+ pages…

I’d suggest that you’d learn a lot more reading a book than you would just copying someone else’s templates. Plus, I don’t think there are many CSS books of 500+ pages.