Published

Today my first book, Beginning CSS: Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design, was released. Published by Wrox, this is the 3rd edition of a popular book that was previously written by Richard York, and I can only hope it is reviewed as favourably as his editions.

Richard gets author credit on the 3rd edition because this a revision, albeit one with lots of new stuff, rather than a rewrite. When Wrox offered me the job of creating the 3rd edition they let me make the decision on whether to revise or rewrite – I choose to revise it as I had no idea of what I was getting myself in to and figured it would be easier than starting with a blank page. In fact I found editing another persons words harder than writing the original copy in the book. If there is a next time, I’ll know better.

The process of writing / revising a book was interesting, a combination of frustration, hard work and satisfaction. I spent over 6 months knowing that whenever I was doing anything in my spare time other than writing that I had something I should be doing. At the same time browser vendors don’t have the good grace to stop working on their products (not even Microsoft!) so that the book doesn’t get out of date so quickly. While everything I wrote applies perfectly well to the latest versions of browsers, the deadline for the last chapter was just before the release of both IE9 and Firefox 4, and I knew nothing about IE10 or Firefox 5.

When I was done it was a great relief, but only a few weeks after I was already missing it, and couldn’t stop myself working on a chapter outline for another book. Whether I’ll ever write it is a different matter.

For now I can only hope that someone, somewhere, learns a thing or two about CSS from this book, and that they go on to enjoy creating websites as much as I do.