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Comment by andi999 | Hacker News Reader

Anybody knows a good book on CSS for ppl with a solid programming background? Every couple of years I try something and fail. Somehow the tutorial rave about the cascading on and on, and when it comes how to strategically design a good SAP working on different devices the stuff gets mute quickly.

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Not a book but https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS is my go-to for all things CSS, I love mdn it's a fabulous resource.

Also zeal (dash on Mac which is paid or you can build zeal yourself like I did) has docsets for CSS which are good.

https://caniuse.com/ is also invaluable to check whether the cool CSS feature is actually supported. it's very much today's quirksmode.com.

Once upon a time I would have recommended Eric Meyer's CSS Definitive Guide without hesitation (I think I still have my 1st Edition copy) and it looks like he's re-released with updates for flexboxes and grids.

Can't recommend Andy Bell and Heydon Pickering's Everyday Layout enough. It's a wonderful resource for learning (and re-learning) contemporary best practice CSS.

https://every-layout.dev/

I have every book written by Heydon and am currently doing Andy's 11ty course. They're both stellar teachers and some of the most knowledgeable programmers when it comes to HTML and CSS. Every Layout is amazing. Strong recommend.

Best resource I've found to learn the foundation of HTML/CSS is Shay Howe's guides [1]. I think it doesn't cover Flexbox and more advanced layouts, but it's totally worth a read. I still go back to it as reference from time to time.

[1] https://learn.shayhowe.com/

I’ve written a small CSS ebook if that interests you. [1] It teaches you how to build a webpage from scratch.

I’m currently writing my second one, which will be more theoretical and cover things like this blog post actually. I’d be interested to know what kind of problems you’re facing in CSS, so feel free to drop me an email.

[1] https://jgthms.com/css-in-44-minutes-ebook/

I'm curious about your book, as it seems small enough for the kind of things I write as well [1]. Can I ask if it earns you enough for anything?

Sorry for coming out of nowhere, but I have lots of small tutorials I could use (I teach in a local college) which I could make small ebooks out of them.. Looking for some side money..

[1] https://github.com/joaoventura/full-speed-python

I've been earning a bit on a regular basis since I published it 1 year and a half ago. Not enough for replacing a salary, but enough as side pocket money. I'm lucky to have a decent following, so I didn't have to market it a lot. I'm currently writing a second one which is longer and more advanced, so hopefully it will earn me a bit more.

Thanks for the reply! Do you have any practical tips you may want to share? Maybe how did you grow your audience, how you wrote your book (technologies, etc.)?

Well I grew my audience on Twitter by building open source projects. [1] I didn't really plan or aim for anything. It mostly happened.

As for technologies, I just wrote the book in markdown using Sublime Text. Then I used a markdown-to-pdf library from GitHub to generate my ebook, and voilà. Nothing fancy really.

[1]: https://twitter.com/jgthms

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