Introducing The Book of CSS3

Warning This article was written over six months ago, and may contain outdated information.

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 of CSS3The 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!)

8 comments on
“Introducing The Book of CSS3”

  1. Awesome news. Been waiting for a good advanced CSS3 book. Gonna preorder shortly!

    Congrats on the release.

    Radius Kuntoro [May 10th, 2011, 17:54]

  2. Great book, I am enjoying it the third day in a row non-stop. Thanks a lot!
    Sorry for a trivial question, but is there a way to download all the sample code from the supporting side as a single zip?

  3. @Luiz: Thanks, I’m really glad you’re finding it useful. I haven’t put all the examples together in a zip file, but it will be easy to do so. I’ll do it tonight and drop you an email.

  4. Hi Peter, bought your book last week. I’m only a few pages in and I’ve already learnt a great deal. I’m really enjoying your no-nonsense, straightforward style of writing. However, the companion site seems to be down – it says “This domain name expired on Oct 28 2011 11:00PM”. Any ideas when it might be running again? And could you tell me where I could access the source code for the book? Many thanks, Steve K.

  5. Hi Steve,

    Thanks so much for buying the book, hope the rest of it is useful to you. My deepest apologies for the downtime of the site; I accidentally let the domain expire. I’ve renewed it now so it should be back on line shortly, including all of the source code for the examples.

  6. Hey, I was wondering if you knew that there are plenty of places that anyone can download the full book for free. I downloaded it but had a look into the copyright afterwards and whether it was actually available for free, and saw that you are selling it. Have a look in google, type in bookofcss3.pdf
    Just a heads up

  7. Jake, yes I know that some places are offering it for illegal download, but there’s little the publisher and I can do about it; legal notices are usually ignored, and even if a copy is removed someone else can post another one any time. All I can hope is that decent people buy a copy of the book if they like it, or at the very least give it a good review somewhere so that it encourages others to buy it.

  8. Hi Peter, I’m also reading through the book and enjoying it. Have you put the downloadable sample code online anywhere? It would be great to be able to experiment with the examples.