Dan Cederholm’s CSS3 For Web Designers is a strip down version of his excellent Handcrafted CSS. While both books covered transitions, hovering effects, 2D transforms, multiple backgrounds and form enhancement, Handcrafted CSS delved further into useful topics such as CSS reset, framework, float management, ampersand and Ethan Marcotte’s invaluable contribution on the fluid grid. So if you already own a copy of Handcrafted CSS, you don’t need CSS3 For Web Designers. Between the two, I still strongly recommend Handcrafted CSS.

Need a bootcamp train on search engine optimization? Look no further than John Jerkovic’s SEO Warrior. Jerkovic has done excellent job of balancing the art and the science of SEO to help readers understand how major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing, see web sites. From registering domain to taking advantage of tools like Google Webmaster to building links to avoiding spams, SEO Warrior is the ultimate guide for anyone who interested in making his web sites play well with search engines and therefore increasing visibility and findability. Definitely a recommendation.

After five years on sabbatical, Miles Davis made a comeback in 1980 and continued to create controversial music until his death in 1991. In The Last Miles, George Cole spent almost 450 pages covering every track from The Man With The Horn all the way up to Doo-Bop. Cole interviewed musicians who worked with Miles and quoted critics who had written about Miles. While Cole’s focused and thorough research makes The Last Miles informative and insightful, particularly Tutu, which alone takes up four chapters of the book, his lacking of “definitive assessment” makes a weak case for Miles’s final decade. Cole informed us both sides of the controversy, but hardly from the author’s point of view. Perhaps Cole is being too respectful of Miles music?

Farah Jasmine Griffin and Salim Washington’s Clawing at the Limits of Cool draws an enlightening comparison between the musical innovation of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. From their different upbringing to their fruitful collaboration to their opposite development, the authors illustrate the love, connection, respect and influence between “the Prince of Darkness and the Bearer of Light, each occupying an opposing end of our spiritual and/or iconographic continuum.”

Just finished Paul Tingen’s Miles Beyond, an insightful read on Miles Davis’s electric journey from 1967-1991. Tingen delves not into only Miles’s fearless musical directions, but also his dark personality. Tingen argues, “Miles Davis’s greatness lies in the fact that he achieved some extraordinary things and was a deeply flawed human being at the same time. Fleshing out his human side increases the depth and meaning of his legacy.” Highly recommended for those who seek to explore the electric adventures of Miles Davis.

Need to catch up on on HTML5 quick? Look no further than Jeremy Keith’s concise HTML5 for Web Designers. Keith also does an excellent job of clarifying the confusions of the new markup.

With clear explanations and demonstrations, Keith walks readers through some of the major developments in HTML5: the simplified approach to markup, the native support of rich media, the handling of form without JavaScript and the addition of new elements.

HTML5 is not the future but the present of the web. Even Steve Jobs has jumped on the bandwagon. If you’re a web designer, you should too and HTML5 for Web Designers, published by A Book Apart (the new Visual QuickStart Guide), will help you get started. Keep an eye on Keith’s blog on HTML5 as well.

Richard Williams’s The Blue Moment is not just another study of Miles Davis’s monumental Kind of Blue, but the chapter that delves into each of the album’s masterpiece alone is worth the price of the book. Williams’s meticulous yet comprehensible analysis makes the music easy to understand even to none-jazz fans. His take on “So What” is an illustrative example:

Davis’s solo begins against an apparently inadvertent but superbly appropriate crash from Cobb’s cymbal—perhaps the most famous cymbal crash in all of jazz history—as the drummer switches from brushes to sticks; hanging and decaying over the first two bars of the improvisation, the shimmering sound provides a perfect platform for the trumpeter, who prowls the scale like a cat picking its way between windowsill ornaments, his peerless lyricism in full bloom.

All you have to do is play “So What” and you can hear what exactly he is talking about. But that’s not all. The Blue Moment also shows the success of Davis’s sidemen like John Coltrane, Bill Evans and Cannonball Adderley who had learned and drawn inspiration from Kind of Blue and moved beyond it. From the Velvet Underground to James Brown to the Soft Machine, the Miles Davis’s influence could be heard. The Blue Moment is definitely a joy to read from start to finish, but if you just want to learn about Kind of Blue, the title chapter is a must-read.

Last November, Dana’s brother gave her a copy of Ruth Yaron’s Super Baby Food for her birthday. Dana and I looked at the book and frowned: a baby food book with almost 600-page long and no photos to inspire us to cook. I was not impressed with the cover design and the book layout either so SBF ended up on our bookshelf.

During the holiday break, I took off work to spend time with Duke. While he was sleeping, I cracked the book open and started to read. To my surprise, I kept turning page after page. The first part of the book is packed with so much useful information that I had to start all over, even though I already reached 100 pages, to take notes. From the safety guides on how to buy a high chair to the best time to feed your baby to four-day waiting period to introduce new food, SBF is more than just a book on recipes. I picked up tips that I have not thought of before, like something as simple as cleaning baby teeth with Q-Tips after meals, not to make a disgusted face when changing his diaper, “which may teach him that his private parts are repulsive and lead him to believe that sex is ‘dirty’ when he gets older,” and, most important of all, never force him to eat.

SBF breaks down the advantages of home-cook from the quality of the food to the cost savings. For instance, she compares whole grains versus processed grains to contrast the lost of nutrients during the refinement. This is the book that I should have read before Duke turned 6-month, even though Dana has been doing a fabulous job of preparing healthy solid meals for our boy. I highly recommend SBF to new parents; however, consulting with a pediatrician is necessary when in doubts, like introducing yogurt after 6 months instead of 12 or introducing nuts at the early age.

Despite the not-so-attractive cover, Jason Cranford Teague’s Fluid Web Typography is an informative crash course on designing Web sites with typefaces beyond Arial, Times, Verdana, Trebuchet MS, and Georgia. FWT touches on the fundamental elements of typography, provides the list of cross-OS Web fonts, and breaks down the three methods of using fonts: linking (@font-face), third-party services (Typekit, Kernest.com, Typotheque), and embedding with Javascript (Cufón). The resource section also included my man Tim Brown’s Nice Web Type.

George Law, an exceptional graphic designer and typographer at Vassar College, said that Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style is a book “to be read once a year.” I am taking his advice because Bringhurst packed so much useful information into this book that I discover something new every time I read it. Bringhurst is such a great writer that he makes words and letters “dance in their seats. Sometimes they rise and dance in the margins and aisles.” The Elements is not just for anyone who appreciates the art of typography, but also for anyone who appreciates the art of music and language. As he puts it: “Good typography is like bread: ready to be admired, appraised and dissected before it is consumed.”