Comments about No Starch Press The Book of CSS3:

A fabulous book with very good information about where some of the w3 recommendations are still in development. I love how this book is organized, fabulously well written and really well organized. It is also really complete and with css3 being new, you can't know everything. This book covers everything :) If you buy one css3 book buy this one.

Comments about No Starch Press The Book of CSS3:

The ideal audience for this book is a web developer who is familiar with CSS and has designed several websites. In other words, you won't learn how to design a nice layout but you will learn all of the details about CSS 3.

The things I liked about this book are that there are numerous examples in every chapter, with pictures that demonstrate different CSS properties. Of course, what good is a book about CSS without pictures?
Another thing that you will find useful is at the end of every chapter, Peter provides a chart outlining how well the major browsers support a particular feature.

There aren't many bad things about this book. My suggestion is that you do not read it cover to cover, as I believe it would be better used as a reference book. The only other thing that I didn't like about this book is that the examples are in black & white; it would've been nice to see the images in color, especially in the PDF version of this book.

Overall, it's a great book to get to learn how to implement the latest cool features in CSS 3. The numerous examples in the book are very helpful, and it will serve as a great reference book to keep on your desk.

Comments about No Starch Press The Book of CSS3:

When I previously thought about CSS I would only think about:

1. selectors, or selector hierarchies, and
2. properties related to those selectors

Although both are covered in detail in this book, the book really helped me discover things I had no idea I didn't know about CSS.
The book does a great job of not explaining fundamentals of CSS and focuses instead on what's new in CSS3.

Media queries in particular was great to know about for making your website capable on mobile devices.
After reading its chapter I immediately implemented media queries on my blog.

I really liked how this book was organized, the first part deals with the CSS3 features that are already implemented in major browsers, followed by the parts which are partially implemented, and finally the things which are not yet implemented or agreed upon and are likely to change.
Every chapter ends with each major browser and the support it has for the features discussed in the chapter.

Other features like opacity, RGBA & HSL & HSLA colors, drop shadows, rounded corners, and much more were great to know about.

Several tips are provided for working with older browsers in a sane manner throughout the book for just about each section.

My only criticism in this book is that it would have been ideal to know not what is expected in IE9 but what is actually in IE9.
IE9 was released March 14th,2011 this book was released in April, 2011. I can understand though that this would have delayed the release of the book.

Comments about No Starch Press The Book of CSS3:

As on of the contributors to TinyMCE, it's important for me to be well on top of CSS for two reasons, first to ensure that we support CSS well for our customers, and second to ensure that we leverage it well for the product.

The book of CSS3 presents the new features included in CSS3 in a readable, well written style. I found interesting and noteworthy points in almost every chapter. Some of the particularly valuable topics follow. The coverage of media queries and web fonts particularly interesting, particularly since I was recently talking with a customer about cross platform friendly fonts. The chapters on selectors and pseudo elements were also interesting and add some more useful tools to the shed. The CSS appearance attribute has very exciting implications for accessibility (expect a blog post soon with some more thoughts and an example). The collection of tools and resources tucked away in the appendices at the end are well worth a looks well, as is the books companion website (http://thebookofcss3.com/).

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in what's possible now with CSS3 or what's coming soon. Take a look through the table of contents to get a quick idea then dive deep to really learn. I'd almost go as far as to say that anyone who is doing front end development must read this book.

[This book was reviewed as a part of the O'Reilly Blogger Review Program]

Comments about No Starch Press The Book of CSS3:

http://codingonthetrain.tumblr.com/post/6564922113/review-the-book-of-css3

Comments about No Starch Press The Book of CSS3:

This book is just chock full of goodness. Not only does the Book of CSS3 by Peter Gasston provide a thoughtful introduction to the latest and greatest power of CSS3 (the history and background of which is covered superbly), it offers clear, thorough and well illus­trated examples built on tips, tricks and real world experience. This book is aimed at those with some experience with CSS in gen­eral but does not demand an in-depth knowledge. It jumps in and demonstrates by doing and provides a logical path through the vari­ous facets of CSS3.

The material covered in the book is extensive and thorough and moves with a logical pro­gression allowing this (unlike some more reference oriented pieces) to be passed through linearly. It also contains an elabourative table of contents retaining its use as a solid ref­erence source.

The section on the Future of CSS is of particular note, wherein the author explores some of the emerging directions and areas of interest for the next go around of CSS even includ­ing a short discussion of how haptics may well be integrated into CSS. Quite fascinating and certainly new to me.

Gasston provides a useful browser compatibility cart with extensive granularity detailing where CSS3 currently works and where web developers may run into cross-browser issues. This is a great reference tool. Additionally extensive links are provided to online resources that will provide the most current information about compatibility and experi­ence with CSS3.

I would highly recommend this volume for those working beyond off the shelf web tools and desiring to harnessing the new abilities present in CSS3.

Comments about No Starch Press The Book of CSS3:

Peter is perfectly right with his introduction to the book – "Let me tell you a little about who I think you are: You're a web professional who's been hand-coding HTML and CSS (…)". This sentence, probably, describes most of the home grown HTML developers around the world. If you are working with CSS and you want to know what to expect when it comes to CSS3 this book sound to be quite useful. Peter goes over the features of CSS3 while at the same time presenting them in a structured way. He discuses particular rule, shows examples of the usage, and, at the end of each chapter, summarizes their support within most commonly used web engines: WebKit, Firefox, Opera, and IE. You will find this list again within appendix – this way you can easily check whether particular feature is missing or not within given Web browser.

When it comes to the content, it turned out that I am really a casual user of CSS. There are many rules that I was not aware of. This way, I was able to learn new stuff. On the other hand, I think that material is quite demanding for the reader. As Peter states at the beginning of the book: "The Book of CSS3 helps you leverage the excellent knowledge you have of CSS2.1 in order to make learning CSS3 easier. I won't explain the fundamentals of CSS". This is true indeed. You have to have the knowledge of basics in order to benefit from the book. I suggest getting some other position that will teach you CSS from the scratch before targeting this one. What I can definitely say about the book is it's style. It suits me. Peter simply focuses on the matter itself. However, keep it mind that book is not for a beginners.