Guidepost
Published 10 years, 10 months pastAs a followup to the recent public-speaking post, I want to talk about what’s happening with CSS: The Definitive Guide, 4th Edition. So I will!
As many of you know, O’Reilly and I have been trying a new serial publication approach in which pieces of the book are released as they’re finished, generally at the ratio of one chapter per “pre-book”. There are now five such books covering the first six chapters of the final book:
- CSS and Documents, which covers the raw basics of how CSS is associated with HTML, including some of the more obscure ways of strapping external styles to the document as well as media query syntax. It’s free to download in any of the various formats O’Reilly offers.
- Selectors, Specificity, and the Cascade, which combines two chapters to cover all of the various Level 3 selector patterns as well as the inner details of how specificity, inheritance, and cascade. It’s $4.99 to download, $9.99 to get on paper, and $10.99 to get both.
- Values, Units and Colors, which covers all the various ways you can label numbers as well as use strings. It also takes advantage of the new cheapness of color printing to use a bunch of nice color-value figures that aren’t forced to be all in grayscale. $2.99 to download, $7.99 to print, $8.79 for both.
- CSS Fonts, which dives into the gory details of
@font-face
and how it can deeply affect the use offont
-related properties, both those we use widely as well as many that are quickly gaining browser support. $5.99 to download, $7.99 to print, $8.79 for both. - CSS Text, which covers all the text styles that aren’t concerned with setting the font face — stuff like indenting, decoration, drop shadows, white-space handling, and so on. $3.99 to download, $4.99 to print, $5.49 for both.
If you’re curious to know what other people think of these pre-books, all of the above except for “CSS Documents” and “CSS Fonts” have some customer reviews; “CSS Fonts” was recently reviewed by Virginia DeBolt. If anyone who already has one wants to leave a review here in the comments, that’s fine too, though I’ll probably ask you to submit said reviews over at O’Reilly.
Given that all those are out, what’s next? If I were to go by final-book-table-of-contents order, the next chapter would be “Basic Visual Formatting”, but I’m not going to do that, which is one of the big advantages of this approach. Instead, my next topics are going to be transforms, transitions, and animations, and then flexbox. Of course, all such plans are subject to change, but those are the topics I really want to do next, and they’re probably the most relevant topics to be talking about right now.
Given everything happening in my family’s life right now, I’m not going to try to commit to a specific schedule, because I might have to drop everything at next to notice at random. All I can say is that I’ll be getting them out as soon as I can.
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October 18, 2013: Weekly Roundup of Web Development and Design Resources
[…] Guidepost: Eric Meyer updates the status of the fourth edition of his CSS: The Definitive Guide. The first edition of his book, with many post-it notes and notes in the margins, was my go-to book in the early 2000′s. […]
I posted a review of Values, Units, and Colors: Foundational CSS3 Components a while back. I need to grab the latest couple – I was unsure what might happen with the series after having followed along in recent months with your family’s horrific ordeals (never been brave enough to comment on those threads, but my thoughts are with you) and am amazed that you’ve been able to focus on writing at all, though greatly appreciate it. I love the “serial publication approach” as well as ORM’s recent trend in shorter/portioned tomes – will post my reviews of the latest ASAP! :)