Buy These Books

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Lately, I've been reading a ton of books on Cascading Style Sheets. I've saved the one I'm hooked on for last.

So, here we go. These are a few of my favorite books. If I've left off a favorite of yours, please let me know. I'm always ready to hear about books that help us to build a better web.

(X)HTML Books

HTML for the World Wide Web with XHTML and CSS
Elizabeth Castro's industry standard is a solid buy. A great How To reference. I use it all the time. It helped to create my Joy Of Code Online Workshop.

HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide - O'Reilly (not Bill)
You can't learn XHTML/HTML - the stuff of which web pages are made - without this book. This one is used in lots of classrooms.

CSS Books

Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web
If you really want to learn Cascading Style Sheets, go to the masters, Hakon Wium Lie and Bert Bos. Why? Who better to know about CSS than the guys who developed the specs?

CSS in 10 Minutes - Russ Weakley
He lied. It's at least 15 minutes. This is a concise resource. It is not for anyone totally unfamiliar with the awesome beauty that CSS can render.

Eric Meyer On CSS
Each chapter is a project that gets you working with CSS. Learn how to transform a bad, old page into a good, new one and much more. Lots of support files to download and work with.

Other Books

Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity
Jakob Nielsen's tour de force is a discussion of creating sites that humans can use. It's not a How To.

Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance
This one I haven't read yet but I can recommend it just knowing the people who wrote it. It's an update to their standard written 4 years ago.

Javascript For The World Wide Web
Learning a little Javascript could not hurt. JS, among other things, can put a little brains into your otherwise stateless XHTML. This book provides an overall perspective and lots of great examples.

Web Style Guide: Basic Design Principles for Creating Web Sites
You can learn all the markup in the world, but without a sense of style and a sense of typography what's the sense? This one's also called "The Yale Style Guide."

The Best For Last

The book I'm reading now is Andy Budd's CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions. It's for the intermediate CSS-er, so skip it if you are a CSS newbie.

But if you're like me - a solid intermediate - then this is your book. It connects all the dots about CSS that you haven't be able to do on your own. If you're out there Andy Budd - thank you!!