After hearing on twitter that Andy Clarke’s new book, Hardboiled Web Design was finally being published, I got mighty excited. As those of you who know me are well aware, I’m a bit of a web development geek when not doing my day job. So, there’s a new book out that doesn’t drone over how to write markup and CSS, but rather jumps in and just gets on with practical examples. Count me in!

I’ve been following Andy’s progress on both his blog, and via some excellent working examples he’s posted online along the way. There is literally half the book just for CSS3, covering (in the form of practical examples of course) the myriad of selectors available. Suffice to say though, this book isn’t just about CSS3 – far from it in fact – but it does make a welcome and refreshing addition to any web developers bookshelf.

It’s forward thinking. That should be enough justification for it’s purchase alone. Too many times do we see on forums of people stating that “I won’t use this awesome piece of CSS3 functionality on my site because IE doesn’t support it yet”. Give me a break please! Andy very clearly explains that we should use today’s standard as the baseline, and (if necessary) “fix” support for old, depreciated browsers. That came from the days of Transcending CSS (which is still a useful reference point for me).

All in all a great read. Oh and for iPad lovers and those who like to save the planet, there are single and spread PDF versions of the book available too.