I’ve just returned from a few days in Amsterdam, where I was fortunate enough to be part of the first (and only?) CSS Day, an event organised by the team behind Mobilism and Fronteers, who are consummately professional and deserve huge congratulations and thanks for all their work. The conference had the aim of diving deep into CSS through each of the eight speakers discussing a module (or modules) of the CSS spec. My chosen subject was Animations and Transitions; my slides are online now, video should follow shortly.

The day before the conference I gave a whole-day workshop on Responsive Web Design, teaching design and development approaches and – more importantly – a new workflow more adapted to the demands of the new way of working. I was helped hugely in this by the fact that I’d recently finished reading Stephen Hay‘s new book, Responsive Design Workflow.

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I’m very excited to be holding a copy of my new book, The Modern Web, in my hands, and nervous to see what everyone else thinks when it goes on sale next week. If you’d like a copy you can get a whopping 40% off when you pre-order through the publisher in the next week – plus every print copy comes with a FREE eBook. I hope you’ll consider pre-ordering, and look forward (guardedly!) to hearing what you think.

My new book, The Modern Web, will be released at the end of this month, and if you’re interested in reading a sample you can download a PDF of Chapter 6: Device APIs. Readers in North America can now pre-order a copy from the Barnes & Noble website, or drop in to a B&N store in a few weeks.

I am delighted and very proud to announce my new book, The Modern Web. It’s about the modern open web technologies – HTML5, CSS3, SVG, JavaScript, DOM APIs, et al – that are required to build websites and applications in the new multi-device era. Basically, it’s about the Web Platform, but my publishers didn’t think the word “platform” was sexy enough so I had to drop it.

It’s not quite finished yet – I’m still in a final round of edits – but is planned for release in April. I’ll be further promoting it nearer that time (of course), but if you’re interested in pre-ordering you can get good prices from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. Or, if you prefer, you can pre-order “The Modern Web” directly from No Starch Press and get a 30 percent discount and a free eBook copy. It’s a great deal.

I’m equally delighted to announce that I’ll be speaking at Future of Web Design in London, in May of this year, along with a great line-up of excellent speakers. I’ll also be giving a one-day CSS3 Masterclass before the conference. Tickets are on sale now, and if you book before 1st March you’ll get £100 off the total price. Another great deal.

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.