Last night I picked up a copies of Eric Meyer on CSS and Designing with Web Standards, the definitive books on XHTML/CSS design from two leading web visionaries. After looking over the books, I realized that there wasn’t much in them that I hadn’t read on their websites, but I bought them anyway.
Why? Oh, it might be because thumbing through these two books is much easier than clicking your way through several years worth of blog posts on dozens of sites. Which is exactly how I’ve spent the last six months. I sure wish I would have had these books then.
Another reason is that by buying these books, I can loan them out to all of the folks I’m trying to convert into standards-lovers. Most folks don’t have the patience to pore over as many sites as I do each day, and just about everyone but me learns better from tutorials than by reading the standards and looking at people’s CSS files.
The most important reason is probably that I’ve used up way more than $80 worth of bandwidth on their sites and I thought it would be nice to pay them back for all the help.
If you’d rather not shell out the money for these books, you could just research these topics on the web. Here’s a list of the sites I check every day: (in no particular order)
Enjoy!