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!)