The chapters are written, the screenshots taken, and the copy editing has begun. . . My new book, Getting StartED with CSS, is bang on schedule to hit the bookstores in November. The book is aimed principally at beginners, but after a gentle start, it moves at a fairly rapid pace. So, if you’re one of those people who have dabbled, but still “don’t get CSS”, then this book is for you, as well.

My motive for writing the book was the release of Internet Explorer 8, which offers full support for the whole of CSS2.1. Of course, it will take some time before older, buggy versions of Internet Explorer finally disappear. Even so, the rapid uptake of IE8 means that more than half of all people surfing the web now use a standards-compliant browser. IE8′s support for CSS2.1 is as good as Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome, and Opera. In some respects, it’s even better. If cross-browser support for CSS has been holding you back, it shouldn’t do so any longer.

The other thing I had in mind is that most books I have read on CSS either throw a lot of rules at you all at once, or they just concentrate on “cool” techniques. My aim was to avoid front-loading the book with a mass of rules. After outlining a few basics, I introduce new rules and concepts only as they’re needed. However, you can’t avoid rules in CSS; and by the time you reach the end of Getting StartED with CSS, you will have studied every visual and print property in the CSS2.1 specification. The book teaches you some cool techniques, but the main emphasis is on understanding how CSS works by explaining how everything fits together and showing you how to use CSS analysis tools, such as Firebug, the Web Inspector panel in Safari 4, and the Developer Tools panel in IE8.

Like most of my other books, it’s a mixture of reference material and hands-on exercises. There’s also a very comprehensive appendix that lists all properties with their permitted values, and references back to the chapters where you can find a full description of how to use them.