When Five Simple Steps approached me to write a pocket guide for their new series of short, digital format only books, I thought it a great chance to cover the cutting edge of CSS layout. I wanted to cover those new proposals in CSS3 that have the potential to radically change how we layout web pages.
It is really difficult to cover proposals at such an early stage within the timescales of the traditional publishing process. If you have followed the development of Flexbox for example, you can see how that proposal changed, after there were already prefixed browser implementations. With a traditional process the chance of a book being out of date before hitting the shelves is likely. At the very least the information will be incorrect quite quickly, yet sat on shelves waiting to confuse, for years.
The ebook publishing process is rapid, especially with such short books. Books in digital format can also be updated. This meant that I could write about what we know now, what works in browsers now without worrying about the longevity of the information.
The book covers multi-column layout, CSS Flexible Box layout (flexbox), CSS Grid Layout, CSS Exclusions and CSS Regions. For more information and to buy a copy visit the Five Simple Steps website.
This book also has the dubious honour of being the only thing I have written to be released while I was in hospital. To read that story you can read my personal site, however it explains why I didn’t post this last week!