Web Designer's Reference Friends of ED, 2004
Although the title makes it sound dry and academic, nothing could be further from the truth. It's a practical, hands-on book about building stylish web pages with CSS. There are chapters devoted to text, navigation, tables, and the CSS box model. But it's not just about CSS. Craig covers all the essentials for working with web pages. He hates frames, but acknowledges that they can be useful in the right context, and devotes a chapter to highlighting the pitfalls and how to avoid them. There are also chapters on choosing the best HTML and image editors, and a brief chapter on multimedia. As technical editor, it was my job to test all the code to make sure that it worked. It does. What I liked particularly about Craig's approach is that he doesn't simply give you the CSS style rules for a drop cap and leave it at that; he shows you step-by-step what each rule is doing. Consequently, you end up not only knowing how to create a nice text effect, but also understand how the rules interact with each other. He takes the same approach with pull quotes, navigation, and restyling the same content in different ways. My other role as technical editor was to make sure that Craig had got his facts right, and that everything was up to date with the latest versions of the W3C standards. Where there was any doubt, we pored over the specifications (not the most user-friendly of documents) until we were satisfied. The result is an accurate and user-friendly guide to all aspects of web page design that should appeal to beginner and expert alike. |
Web Standards Solutions friends of ED, 2004
One of the first things you notice on opening the book is that the Foreword is written by none other than Jeffrey Zeldman, the great-granddaddy of web standards advocates. As he puts it, Dan Cederholm offers "clear examples and no wasted words" of how to design clean, lightweight web pages. Whereas Zeldman's own book, Designing with Web Standards (also reviewed on this site), is more of a treatise on why such standards are so important, this is a practical guide to their implementation. It covers navigation menus, styling lists, hyperlinks, text, background images, etc, etc. Usually each example requires only a few lines of CSS, and in line with his principle of keeping things simple, Dan Cederholm shows you how to avoid becoming "class happy". If you don't know what that means, then perhaps you should just drop everything now, and order this book immediately. Being class happy is a stage that just about everyone new to CSS goes through (I know, I've done it myself), applying classes to just about everything in sight, ending up with markup that's almost as complex as the font tag soup it's intended to replace. Even though I've been working with CSS for several years now, I still found quite a few fresh ideas in this book, particularly on the use of less frequently explored tags, such as cite and q. I also found a lot of honesty. I was particulary wary when I approached one of the final chapters - on the controversial subject of image replacement. Dan Cederholm demonstrates three of the main ways of using background images to replace text, and highlights both their advantages and drawbacks, before going on to demonstrate how they can be used effectively in a way that doesn't damage a site's accessibility. The final chapter also shows how a site can be composed of both two-column and three-column pages with just a simple change of class. All very simple - deceptively so. |
Google Hacks O'Reilly, 2003
This is not the sort of book that you sit down and read from cover to cover. As the subtitle '100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools' suggests, it's designed for you to dip in and find the answer to a particular problem. Still, I found myself being drawn to read more and more, thinking: 'Wow, I'd no idea you could do that.' Things such as how to use Google to find a telephone number in the United States, or how to narrow down your search to a particular site (say, for instance, you want to look for an old article in the site of a specific newspaper or magazine). The first quarter of the book is filled with simple, but useful tips like this, but then it gets into more advanced territory - specialist searches, getting Google by email, and building a form to conduct searches within a specific date range. Most of the second half of the book is devoted to the Google API, which enables web developers to build their own customized search applications with Perl, PHP, XML and other programming languages. Unless you're familiar with programming, this section of the book will be less helpful, although it's still fascinating to read what can be done. The final eight tips look at Google from the point of view of a web designer - how to get that all-important position close to the top of Google's search results. It has to be pointed out that these are only educated guesses - Google does not reveal its secrets to outsiders - but they have a strong ring of truth about them. There's also advice on how to get back into Google's good books after being banned, and how to get Google to remove material you don't want the rest of the world to see. Even if you use only a handful of the tips contained in Google Hacks, I think you'll find it an entertaining and illuminating read. |
Designing With Web Standards New Riders, 2003
In Designing With Web Standards, Zeldman nows turns his attention on designers and makes the case for switching to cleanly coded XHTML and CSS. He does so with passion, humour and a lot of down-to-earth common sense. The message is simple and appealing: standards are not about forcing everyone into a design straightjacket, they are "about building sophisticated, beautiful sites that will work as well tomorrow as they do today". The question is - how? Does it mean abandoning tables for layout, moving all inline markup to external stylesheets, and converting all font sizes to ems or percentages? The answer is - it depends. Zeldman describes this as "a transitional book for a transitional time", and he admits that his some of his solutions will be regarded as "evil and sinful" by standards geeks. So, relax (unless you're a standards geek). This is not a hairshirt course in standards purity, but a practical guide to making websites that work in today's browsers, and that won't suddendly break when the next new browser comes out, as so often happened in the past. It also gives a clear answer to that hoary old question about whether to continue supporting Netscape 4 - Zeldman says to give people who use outmoded browsers the best visual experience you can under their limited circumstances, but do not exclude them. In other words, forget about pixel-perfect solutions that look the same in every browser (a virtual impossibility, anyway). But at the same time, make sure your site doesn't crash N4. It's easy if you create valid, logical code - and this book will show you how. Zeldman also offers eminently sensible advice about fixed and proportional font sizes. He uses a pragmatic mixture of the two, and frankly acknowledges "no matter what you do, you're going to frustrate somebody". Much of Designing With Web Standards will be familiar to anyone who has already embraced CSS and valid markup; and a lot of it has been said by others - Rachel Andrew and Al Sparber are just two writers who come to mind. What's useful about this book is that it not only shows you how to design according to industry-wide standards, but also explains why you should do it. (Money and time saved are just two good reasons that should have universal appeal.) The book also acts as a useful reference for such technical issues as Doctypes, workrounds for major CSS display problems, making sites accessible to those with disabilities, and making sure that modern sites are viewable in all devices - from text browsers to handheld PDAs. Zeldman acknowledges the web is constantly changing, but the advice in this book should hold for many years to come. |
Speed Up Your Site New Riders, 2003
The reason my head is spinning is because it's not a book of "cool tips", although some bits of advice can be implemented very quickly. The way to optimize CSS is not just through deleting white space. It involves going through stylesheets to make the most efficient use of the cascade. Andrew King's approach is very methodical and detailed, particularly when he discusses optimizing JavaScript. Not only does he describe how to make the files physically smaller, he analyzes the efficiency of various programming methods - which loops work faster, caching frequently used values, shortening scope chains, and other advanced techniques. For anyone writing their own JavaScript routines, there's a lot of valuable information I've certainly not come across before. There are also chapters on optimizing graphics and multimedia; as well as a section on advanced server-side techniques and content compression. A chapter on keyword optimization walks you through the process Andrew King used to select the keywords for his own site, giving a helpful insight into designing meta tags that are light, but effective. This is not a book for beginners, although they would learn some valuable lessons from it, particularly about not filling the head of every document with vast amounts of JavaScript. It's more suitable for web professionals or amateurs with a good knowledge of technology. Perhaps the most important thing I came away from this book with was a heightened sense of the need to think again whether each element of a page is really needed. Armed with the information inside, I shall be reviewing my methods in the hope of creating even leaner, faster loading sites. Oh, and by the way, for those who think page size no longer matters because of the spread of broadband - think again. Most people still access the internet on slow modems; and for high traffic sites, big pages are not only slower, they're more expensive - bandwidth costs money. |
The Web Professional's Handbook Glasshaus, 2003
Although the book is not a tutorial, it's not just a collection of tag references, either. Each section contains well-written background material, making it the sort of book that's useful to keep at hand and dip into in spare moments to brush up on what's now become a very technical and broad-ranging subject. Should you part with your hard-earned cash, though, and get this book? It's not an easy question to answer, as the people it will be most useful to probably already own several books covering the same subjects in more detail. On the other hand, do you really want to lug out a 1,000 page or more tome every time you need to look up an aspect of JavaScript? Is there room on your desktop for half a dozen books, or would you prefer everything to hand in just 400 pages? Particularly if you're travelling about, and need a quick reference book that's also a good read, then I think you'll find it money well spent. How does it compare with Jennifer Niederst's "Web Design in a Nutshell"? Both are excellent reference works, but this one goes much deeper into JavaScript and XML, making it more suitable for code warriors. Although they overlap in some areas, I'm happy to have both on my bookshelf. |
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This is my second collaboration with Craig Grannell, this time as technical editor (previously we were co-authors of Foundation Dreamweaver MX 2004). Craig is a talented web designer, who is passionate about web standards, and in my opinion, he's put together a very practical and readable guide. As the book's subtitle says, it's "an integrated approach to web design with XHTML and CSS".
Dan Cederholm's personal website and company are called SimpleBits, a name that could equally apply to this nifty, little book. For anyone already deep into CSS, this book is probably a bit too simple, but for anyone still yet to be convinced of the value of embracing web standards, this is likely to be an ideal introduction. It's also perfect for designers who've decided to take the pluge, but still can't get their head around CSS. Although Dan's approach to design is "keep it simple", that doesn't mean boring or plain. What he demonstrates in chapter after chapter is that you don't need complex markup to achieve elegance. By keeping things simple, the accessibility of a site is also greatly enhanced.
Google is already so easy to use, and so much part of my daily life, I was sceptical that anybody could write a book making it easier. I was wrong. Not only does it make things easier, Google Hacks opens up a whole new perspective on what you can do with this massive online index to the world's web pages.
For anybody involved in web design, this is quite simply essential reading. Jeffrey Zeldman was one of the prime movers in bringing an end to the period of browser wars when, as co-founder of the Web Standards Project (WaSP), he helped persuade Microsoft and Netscape to stop trying constantly to outdo each other in developing mutually incompatible browsers. Even though Internet Explorer has overwhelming dominance of the browser market, by and large it has adopted the same industry-wide standards as Netscape, Mozilla, Opera and Safari. The only people not to have fallen into line are web designers, the vast majority of whom still build websites using cumbersome methods such as inline font tags, spacer gifs and deeply nested tables.
After reading this book, my head is spinning. At first, some of the ideas struck me as being ludicrous, such as shaving extra white space off CSS files, but it set me thinking seriously about this site. Since each page is dynamically created from a database, I didn't know exactly how big they were, and got a shock to discover they weighed in at average of 135KB. By the time, I had finished with the techniques in this book (including the CSS tip), they were down to 72KB - still a bit big for my liking, but much slimmer and faster to load.
As the title suggests, this is a book for people who take web design seriously. It's intended to be a complete reference to client-side technologies in one book, covering XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, graphics, usability, accessibility, and web traffic analysis. Need to check what attributes a particular XHTML tag accepts and whether it's deprecated, or looking for a reminder of the correct JavaScript syntax? The answer's in here.