Adobe Photoshop CS: Classroom in a Book Adobe Press, 2004
What's pleasing about this book is that, although it's very friendly towards complete newcomers to Photoshop like myself, it doesn't waste any time before getting into sophisticated techniques. Consequently, it's likely to be of just as much value to advanced users wanting to get to know the new features of Photoshop CS. The book comes with a CD-ROM containing all the images for the exercises, and most of them are stunning. Because Photoshop's core user base originated with print designers, a couple of chapters focus on issues that will be of less interest to web designers, such as working with CYMK separation. Several chapters, though, are devoted to creating images specially for the web in both Photoshop and Image Ready, which comes bundled with it. There's also a chapter on colour adjustment for monitors running on the Windows and Mac platforms. The problem with Photoshop is that it's such a massive program, with so many features, I found I was beginning to forget things the deeper I moved into the book. I'm going to have to come back to it again and again until I learn to stand more on my own feet with Photoshop. The combination of the clear writing and beautiful images will make that a pleasure, not a chore. |
Photoshop CS: Down & Dirty Tricks New Riders, 2003
Often with writers that pump out a large number of books, the effects are either cheesy or "interesting, but what would I use it for?" Not so with this book. There are lots of text and photo manipulation techniques here that I'm dying to put to use. The instructions are very easy to follow, and the book's deliberately designed to be dipped into, rather than read in sequence from cover to cover. There's no CD-ROM, but you can download all the images to practise on. I found, however, I was just as happy trying out the same effects on images of my own. That way, you learn more, and get a better idea of the suitability of applying a particular technique to an image. In addition to some very nice type effects, there are techniques for highlighting or drawing the eye to focus on a particular part of an image, tips on how to reproduce some of the Mac acqua effects, and applying images to a 3D cube. Some can be accomplished in a couple of minutes. Others take a bit longer, but I've not come across any yet that have had me banging me head trying to fathom out why it doesn't work the way Scott Kelby says it will. I think I'll be playing with this for a long time to come. Who knows? One day I may even get round to redesigning my own site with some of the things I've learned! |
Dreamweaver MX 2004 Magic New Riders, 2003
The biggest disappointment is that Massimo Foti, a brilliant creator of Dreamweaver extensions whose name appears as the lead contributor, seems to have been directly involved in only one of the 12 projects in the book. What's more, it's a project that works in ColdFusion and IE6 only. It may be brilliant, but I'll probably never find out because I have no plans to switch my server to ColdFusion. If it were just one project that had this problem, it might be acceptable, but of the five projects using server-side technology, only one has been designed to work with all three main ones, PHP, ASP and CF. Another works with ASP and CF, but the remaining three are single-technology projects - one each for ASP, ASP.NET and CF. It's no criticism of the individual authors that they have concentrated on what they know best, but New Riders has let both them and readers down. "Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 Web Application Recipes" by Joseph Lowery and Eric Ott came out a month earlier, and the entire book has been written so that everything works in ASP, PHP and ColdFusion. As a result, the book is bigger - and more expensive - but you get the impression the expense is more than justified. In spite of these serious criticisms, "Dreamweaver MX 2004 Magic" does have some very strong points. Stephanie Sullivan kicks off with a tutorial on using CSS to position and style your pages. Anyone familiar with Stephanie's designs will appreciate that it's a winner, and there are some very useful tips you'll pick up from it. Brad Halstead and Murray Summers (authors of "Dreamweaver MX Templates") each present projects based on using templates for site navigation, again full of useful hints. Eduardo Zubler brings his love of Flash to a project called "Flashing Up Dreamweaver", which includes a very nifty extension called "Flash Date Picker". This, in fact, is one of the strong selling points of the book: the accompanying CD-ROM contains Dreamweaver extensions currently not available elsewhere. Eduardo's extension inserts a pop-up calendar that inserts dates in the correct American or European format into a form. Another feature that will appeal to anyone who finds difficulty following just written instructions is that every project is accompanied by a Quick Time movie showing you how to go through all the steps. Although useful, I would have preferred the authors themselves to talk you through the projects, and explain things that aren't in the text. For my money, at least, the Magic series, while still attractive, has begun to lose its original sparkle. |
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. |
Special Edition: Using Fireworks MX Que, 2002
The book is aimed at beginners to intermediate users, and goes through all the mechanics of Fireworks MX - what the various tools do, and the difference between vector and bitmap objects - before getting on to more creative issues. One section I found particularly helpful is the chapter on masking, something I've never found easy to master, and creating custom shadows. The explanations and illustrations were clear and easy to follow. I also like this book for its honesty about Fireworks' biggest shortcoming - the unwieldy HTML and JavaScript it creates. Jeffrey Bardzell strongly advises using Fireworks for what it's good at - graphics - and creating all the HTML yourself in Dreamweaver. At first glance, flipping through the pages doesn't inspire in the same way as a book like "Playing with Fire", but don't be fooled by first impressions. There is inspiration aplenty, but it's on the accompanying CD-ROM, which contains the examples from every chapter. Opening up the CD-ROM, you realize just how good a designer Jeffrey Bardzell is, and this where the book really shines. Because the files are in png format, you not only see the finished product, but you can take them apart, and examine them layer by layer, inspecting all the settings and experimenting with new ones. By the time you get through, you should not only have a solid understanding of how to use Fireworks MX, but hopefully a bit of Bardzell's design skills will have rubbed off on you, as well. |
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Normally I'm wary of instruction books that carry an "official" title from the producer of software, but several Photoshop users strongly recommended this book to me - and they were right. It's superb. I have used Macromedia's Fireworks for many years, and was completely at a loss trying to find my way around Photoshop. Everything looks so familiar, but often works in a completely different way. This book had me doing things with ease in no time at all, and made me realize why Photoshop has such a loyal following. Many of Photoshop's features make Fireworks pale by comparison.
Scott Kelby is a prolific writer, who specializes in quick, straight-to-the-point instructions. He's the editor of the Killer Tips series of books for New Riders, and this 300-page book contains one on virtually every page - and that's just in the margin! The main focus of the book is 55 mini-projects that teach you how to create sophisticated effects in Photoshop CS with the minimum of effort.
New Riders released this book one week before Christmas, presumably in the hope of filling many Dreamweaver enthusiasts' Christmas stockings. Like a lot of things in Christmas stockings, it's attractive and there are some really good things inside, but there are also plenty of disappointments. The line-up of distinguished authors held the promise of some really good stuff, but I get the impression that the rush to get it out in time for Christmas meant they weren't given the opportunity to polish everything to perfection.
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.
I got this book on the recommendation of Linda Rathgeber, author of "Playing with Fire" (my favourite Fireworks 4 book). She described it as "brilliant". That, plus the fact that Jeffrey Bardzell is a co-founder of phireworks, which produces some very innovative extensions for Fireworks, was enough for me. And very good it is, too.