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!)