More Eric Meyer

on CSS

Voices That Matter™

Getting a Copy of Your Very Own

You can order it from a local bookseller, of course; many of them can get a book within a few days at most, and are often able to work with you to find related books that might be of interest. Your business would probably be very much appreciated, and it will help to support your community and its economy.

If you'd like to order the book online, it would be nice if you got it straight from Peachpit/New Riders. Why would that be nice? It means that the title generates more revenue for New Riders, since there is no middleman distributor taking a cut. This is the most direct way of voting for the importance of the topic and encouraging New Riders to devote more resources to publishing CSS-related books. It also means that the author gets more money per copy sold, but we're sure that has nothing at all to do with this recommendation. Nope, nothing at all.

If you'd rather save a bit more money—and these days, who can blame you?—then we recommend using the service available from ISBN.nu, which lets you see the prices of several merchants at once. The entry for this book is found at:

Note that not every online merchant is represented on ISBN.nu, so if your favorite site isn't listed, try searching there as well.

Before you buy this book from any source, however, you should read the next part of this page. It will help you make an informed decision about buying the book before you actually plunk down your money, because as much as we like sales, we vastly prefer to sell the book to people who will find it useful. Therefore, in an excerpt from the book's introduction, we ask...

Should You Buy This Book?

That isn't a facetious question. As proud as I am of the work contained in the book, I'm also keenly aware that it is not for every reader. So let me take a moment to describe two kinds of readers: those for whom this book was written and those for whom it was not.

Those For Whom This Book Is Meant

You ought to find this book useful if you match one or more of the following criteria:

Those For Whom This Book Is Not Meant

You might not find this book to be useful if one or more of the following describes you:

What You Can Expect From This Book

From the outset, my intent has been to write an engaging, interactive book that focuses on practical and interesting uses of CSS that can be deployed in today's browsers. To do this, each project evolves from having no styles to being fully styled and ready for deployment on the Web. If I've done my job well, you should get the feeling of watching over my shoulder as I work on a project, with me commenting on what I'm doing as I do it.

Although you can simply read the text and look at the figures to get a sense of how a project is evolving, I think the best way to work along with the book is to have a Web browser and a text editor open as you read. That way, you can follow along with the changes I make in the text by physically making the same changes in your project file and seeing the changes in your own Web browser.

There is one point on which I want to be very clear: The techniques shown in this book are generally meant for browsers whose version number is greater than or equal to 5 (well, and Safari 1.0+). If you have to design a site that looks the same in Explorer 4.x and Netscape 4.x as it does in IE6.x and NS7.x, this book is probably not for you.