Launched today is the fourth edition of my book The CSS Anthology, retitled to The CSS3 Anthology to reflect the major rewrite that this edition has been through. You can get the digital version right now from Sitepoint, and also order the print edition if you like your books the traditional way.
The first edition of the book was published in 2004. It contained solutions such as, “How do I hide CSS from Netscape 4”. In many ways the situation we were facing with Netscape 4 was very similar to that with Internet Explorer 6 today. The browser had almost gone away, but was present enough in particular contexts, that most of us were still needing to account for it in testing. The second and third editions left the version four and five browsers behind, however were very much updates to the material from that first book.
The 2011 fourth edition is an almost complete rewrite. I have always aimed to make this book a practical handbook of CSS tips that I would happily use myself in production code. When I wrote the third edition browser support for CSS3 was such that I couldn’t do much more than mention in notes that there were better ways to achieve things on the horizon. This time CSS3 is front and centre – with a chapter dedicated to helping you decide what to do with the old browsers that some of us still need to support.
It’s not only browser support for CSS3 that is new. Our attitude to device support and our understanding of what the mobile web will mean to web design and development has changed. New concepts such as responsive design have transformed the way we think about supporting devices. Older editions of this book demonstrated how one might create a layout to be fixed width or fluid. In this version the final chapter demonstrates how to create fixed width layouts but quickly moves on to serve as an introduction to responsive design.
The book aims to be practical and down to earth, and I hope will be really useful to readers. If you’ve read it then I’d love to know what you think!