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In the seven years since I have been back in the web design gig, one name has become synonymous to web design and web programming books and that is Larry Ullman. He is mostly known for his Visual Quick Pro books such as PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual Quick Pro Guide (4th Edition), MySQL, C++, PHP and so on. Therefore, it does not surprise me when I won his newest book Modern JavaScript: Develop and Design at the Adobe User Group. That it would be loaded with a lot of information that you need to know in order to program in JavaScript. At 15 chapters and a whopping 595 pages, expect to take your time with this book because you will be learning JavaScript from scratch and I mean that literally. As you start from the basics of JavaScript to creating little JavaScript programs. While this book is technical in nature, the one thing I notice right away about this book, is that it doesn't feel like that. He breaks everything down and provides great visuals and color in this book. Usually, I never talk about that in my book reviews. You could say it provides the minimalist design and hits that big pop once you start looking at the book and reading along. While a lot of the information is known, he really sticks to word modern as he talks about the Big 5 web browsers, JavaScript Frameworks, tools that he uses and or recommends and so on. As I said earlier, with his many years writing Visual Quick Pro books, it definitely prepped him in preparing this book as it provides that same kind of flow. At $54.99 (Amazon $34.64), that price is well worth picking up this book, granted I am not calling it the JavaScript Bible, but once you get into it, you think it was. Thus, the reason I cannot really pick a chapter out of this book because this caters to everyone who ready to get out of HTML and into a web programming like JavaScript. So to Larry Ullman, I better see a PHP/MySQL book of the same caliber or tackle a challenging language like JSON or Ruby to make it interesting.

The Book I would like to talk to you all today for all you web designers and web developers today is called The Book of CSS3 - A Developer's Guide to the Future of Web Design by Peter Gasston and would briefly like to talk to you all about what this book consists of and that of course is all the exciting and somewhat new and somewhat old features CSS3 has to offer. This book consists of 17 chapters of awesomeness to say the least because Gasston gives a pretty descent break of the syntax of the CSS3 and how they should be set up. On top of that, there are quite a few updates as well especially to the Background, font, and text properties, which I feel are the most important sections in this book. Of course, with all what CSS has to offer and what designers and developers are using now, everything is important. Besides the break down of the syntax of the features, Gasston also talks about which browsers currently accept the features, and surprisingly not all of them do, but i will note that this book did come out in May and so some features might have been updated since then. Earlier, I had mention that some of the CSS3 properties are somewhat new and somewhat old, I meant that in two ways. The first being that some of the stuff this book covers has been well established on the internet, such as gradients, font face, box shadow and text effects like Letterpress. the somewhat new I would say that some of the techniques required the use of JavaScript or engine specific code like Webkit, got the CSS3 treatment again Box Shadow, 2D and 3D, transitions to name a few. Better yet, designers and developers are slowly making that transition as CSS3 is doing a lot that Flash and JQuery have been doing for years in order to produce the same results. So, this does two things for you, it makes your website load faster and the learning process quicker. But I digress, when it comes to this book it is a handy started to get you going but to keep yourself current, go on the web and see what people have done and see what else has been added to the CSS3 specturm