Wow, I have to say that this is a pretty cool deal. Sitepoint is giving away for the next 60 days a FREE, that’s right absolutely free copy of Patrick Lenz Ruby on Rails Web Applications book.

Patrick has been in the web development business for year and is the CEO of development firm limited-overhead.

So is there a catch with the book being free?  Well no but you will have to complete a form to add your email address so you can be sent a link for the book.  If you don’t like being subscribed, you can always easily unsubscribe later.

Well worth the download.  Go get em cause time is ticking!

Amazon.com: How to Cheat in Flash CS3: The art of design and animation in Adobe Flash CS3: Books: Chris Georgenes

He’s at it again. Flash master Chris Georgenes has finished his book on how to master flash animation. Chris is a Adobe Community Expert and is a speaker at many events teaching tips tricks and secrets on how to be a better flash animator.

You can order Chris’s book from Amazon or from any from any good book store that knows a great book when they see one.

Also if your love flash, pop into Chris’s Flash forum at www.keyframer.com/forum where you’ll find Chris chatting with many of his fans and occassionly see me moderating the forums there, or you can visit Chris’s portfolio site at www.mudbubble.com, and visit the books How to Cheat in Flash Book Website.

 This was a previous post updated to include the books recently launched website.

I’ve always enjoyed reading books that challenge your thinking and motivate you to be better at what you do. One area of web design I really have a passion to improve on is CSS or Cascading Style Sheets.

Recently I purchased Transcending CSS by Andy Clarke. Andy has been involved in web design for over ten years, runs his own design studio and contributes in many web standards workshops and conferences all around the world.

Transcending CSS by Andy Clarke

I really think Andy has created a excellent book which is very motivating and inspirational. This book is really well presented with beautiful images inspiring your design thoughts, challenges you to create cutting edge CSS layouts with accessibility and degrading gracefully with older browsers with less CSS support, challenges you not to use hacks and filters in your CSS code providing practical alternatives, and creates an enthusiasm to create better websites than you have ever done before regardless of your skill level.

You will also learn to truly separate visual design from layout and use the power of CSS to create rich semantically structured design that conforms to web standards. Transcending CSS gives you practical processes to streamline your design time and implement time saving techniques developed by professionals in the industry in a real studio environment.

Not really a book for beginners who are still working with table layouts or wanting to learn CSS, but those who have some basic knowledge of CSS and have designed websites, or for advanced CSS users who want to set higher standards in their work.

If your passionate about CSS then you can’t go past this book. I already have a few books on CSS in my bookshelf and this is my pick of the bunch to date.

Edit: As of the 1st of January 2007 this book was listed as No 6 on Amazon’s bestselling book about Scripting and Programming.