Peachpit has just posted a free sample chapter–Measurements, URLs, and Color Units–from my recent book The CSS Pocket Guide. This chapter explores length units, color schemes, and other measurement values used for defining values of CSS properties.
Read my earlier blog post on The CSS Pocket Guide for more info about the book at how to buy it! And if you already have, please let me know what you think in the comments here or via reviews on your favorite book retailer’s web site.
This blog has been a bit quiet the last few months—a direct result of spending all of my non-work hours writing my first book. The CSS Pocket Guide, the results of all that effort, was just sent off to the printers earlier this week and hits the bookstores on October 25.
At the beginning of the Summer a client of mine, and author of The HTML Pocket Guide, Bruce Hyslop approached me on behalf of Peachpit Press who was looking for an author for the next book in their Web Design Series. It meant resigning any hope I had for a bit downtime this Summer after a busy Spring that included teaching for the first time, but after meeting and talking with the team and talking things over with some previous authors I jumped on board. Indeed, it took more than a few long nights and much help by a tech editing tag team of Michael Bester and Kimberly Blessing along with Kim and Cliff at Peachpit to pull together. But in the end I think it was worth the effort and I hope it plays a part in helping a person or two learn about building web pages with web standards and modern development practices.
The goal of The CSS Pocket Guide is to provide a novice or experienced front end developer an introduction to the fundamentals of CSS and then guide them through the building layouts grids, styling type and other typical web content. It also is intended to double as a CSS reference book—organized loosely based on the contents of CSS3 modules making it easy to look up details for individual properties like margin, float, border-radius, or @font-face.
You can pre-order The CSS Pocket Guide, available late October 2010 at your favorite book store:
The CSS Pocket Guide will also be released as part of a boxed set along with The HTML Pocket Guide by Bruce Hyslop and The JavaScript Pocket Guide by Lenny Burdette available late November 2010:
… And now it’s time for things to start returning to what passes for normal and getting back into the groove of more regular posts about making web sites and making pictures.
In a recent post over on the Web Standards Project blog I introduced the newest and first book released by the WaSP – InterACT With Web Standards: A Holistic Approach to Web Design.
This is a great reference teaching the craft and profession of building web sites, and not just a book about markup or 3 column layouts with CSS. Read more about it in the blog post or go straight to the book’s companion site.
Today, November 30, is the 3rd annual Blue Beanie Day — a celebration and visible show of support for Web Standards & semantic, accessible markup. Web designers, developers, and users around the world are sporting blue beanies on their avatars to show their support for doing things right. To learn more about #BBD09 check out:
Blue beanie day was inspired by the now iconic cover photo on Jeffrey Zeldman’s masterpiece Designing with Web Standards.
DWWS is now out with a new 3rd edition in which Jeffrey — along with co-author Ethan Marcotte — has kept things current and relevant 6 years after it’s initial release.
