Towards the end of October, the opportunity presented itself (thanks to the handsome and charming Brian Warren) to contribute to the upcoming 7th edition of Peachpit’s seminal HTML and CSS Visual Quickstart Guide book which will be released on December 27th, 2011. Although the majority of the heavy lifting of updating the book was handled by Bruce Hyslop, Brian and I each contribued wholly new chapters to the book.

In those new chapters, Brian provides an introduction to the use of the CSS @font-face syntax, and I cover a handful of the new(-ish) CSS properties such as border-radius, box-shadow, text-shadow, multiple backgrounds, and background gradients.

Because this book is aimed at newbies, it was an interesting challenge in restraint, and also my ability to distill some complicated properties, along with the use of vendor prefixes down to something a mere mortal can comprehend. If you’ve ever spent any time with the background gradient syntax for example, it’s… um, complicated. That I managed to write something which makes learning the basics of CSS3 gradients simple, I consider that a win.

Aside from some minor aches and pains writing and editing in Word, the process was both a great learning experience and fun. And I, of course, would be remiss to not mention the expert editorial guidance provided by Bruce and our editors Cliff and Robyn.

Brian and I have some ideas cooking for something new, so I suspect this is not the last you’ll see from us in book form. Until then, you can pick up a copy of the HTML5 & CSS3 Visual QuickStart Guide from Peachpit or Amazon.com, or if you happen to be in Canada, from Amazon.ca, or Chapters/Indigo.