Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

The New Book is Out!
Woo-hoo! This morning by courier I received a copy of my latest book, Core CSS, 2nd Edition. According to the last schedule I was given copies should have started to become available earlier in the week, but there's nothing like holding a copy of the actual book in your hands to bring it all home and make it real. Now the next thing is seeing copies of it available in the stores, though that may not happen for another week or so. It's book #4 for me, but it is still a thrill to hold the first copy of a book with my name on it in my hands.

There were a few surprises as I looked the book over. It came in a thick package and I fully expected the entire package to be filled with the contents of the book, but instead it was pretty evenly divided between the book itself and a "corrections" copy of loose pages, the latter there so that I could annotate individual pages with any changes that may be needed to send directly to the publisher. The book was slimmer than I expected it to be, even though I knew beforehand that they were going to use a less-heavy bond paper this time around. But the final effect is that even though the new book is a good 200 pages longer than the original, when put side-by-side against the original on a bookshelf, it ends up being the thinner book! The spine is an eye-catching gold colour chased with a green banner announcing it as the second edition, a pleasant surprise since up until now all I've seen are draft images of the book's front cover, never the spine or back. The other odd thing was looking inside the book and seeing its publication date: 2004. A gather that the publisher does this with all books issued near the end of the year, so as to not pre-maturely date them – an important consideration in computer book field – but I still did a double-take when I first glanced at it.

I am hoping that the book will do well in the field. It is now the most up-to-date reference book dealing with CSS. My chief "rival" in the field has been Eric Meyer's two books, the O'Reilly one primarily dealing with CSS1 and the Osborne one updated for CSS2. The latter book came out in 2001, and plenty has changed in the browser and specification scenes since then. While there may well be another reference book on the subject from Eric (and kudos to him btw – the more competition the better) of late he seems to have concentrated on books that focus on Web designs incorporating CSS rather than applied reference books, which leaves the field wide-open for my new book. While some of the Web standards people may not be entirely happy with it, I know mine is the first book to comprehensively cover the additional CSS properties that have been introduced along the way in various versions of Internet Explorer. My take on it is that it is that they are out there and available, so I felt I would be remiss if I didn't include them in the book. In fact I was spurred to add them from a comment the first book received from someone on Amazon, who said they weren't there. Well, this time they are! ;-) The other main selling feature should be the "look forward" to what extra tools the CSS3 specification would deliver. Under the original plan for the book way back when, the book was designed to come out sometime shortly after CSS3 was ratified, but as it stands there is still no single part of the CSS3 modules that are officially considered final. The compatibility sections are also comprehensive, and I've made a point of including not just the various versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, but also Opera, Mozilla and Konqueror – and on the Web site covering Safari 1.0 and OmniWeb 4.5, which came out after the book had effectively been put to bed.

What with Microsoft not planning on launching a new version of Internet Explorer until their next operating system comes out in a couple of year's time, and with work on the final CSS3 spec perpetually under development, am hoping that this book will have a long shelf-life. Ultimately sales will determine if there will be a third edition, but my plan is to continue work on compatibility testing when new browsers are released and the CSS3 spec is eventually finalized, and add new material to the supporting Web site for this book, using it as a "seed" for research into a later book.

This time around, the book is dedicated to little Annie. It's her turn. ;-)