WebDesignBookReview Archives - Page 10 of 21

Review: Internet Blackout

May 9, 2008 by

Web Teacher

★★★ Internet Blackout by Marcelo Marquez is Volume 1 of O’Reilly’s new Hackerteen series. It’s a graphic novel, O’Reilly’s first effort in the young reader market.

The plot of the story involves Yago and his friends and their experiences with victimization and Internet safety. The story line for Internet Blackout includes viruses, identity theft, and ways to protect yourself online.

Hackerteen is a Brazilian educational project that should be a welcome import into the U.S.A. Teens get valuable information about computer security, entrepreneurship on the Internet, hacker ethics, protecting yourself online and other topics.

The graphics are excellent, the story is engaging, and there’s no talking down to the reader. They are assumed to be savvy and engaged in the Internet in ways that exceed their parents. One subplot of Volume 1 involves a teen who helps his clueless dad save the family business, a bakery. There are several plot lines woven through the 100 page book, which is bound like a paperback novel, not like a comic book.

If you have adolescents or work with them in an educational setting, this book is a good resource. And the kids will enjoy it!

Good for teens

Review: Building Findable Websites

May 2, 2008 by

Web Teacher

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Building Findable Websites: Web Standards SEO and Beyond

★★★★★ Building Findable Websites: Web Standards, SEO, and Beyond by Aarron Walter (New Riders, 2008) is one of those rare books that is so full of good ideas, it makes me enthusiastic about what I can do when I put the book down and go work on my blog or website. By expanding the topic beyond SEO into a broader concept called findability, all sorts of interesting new ideas for getting found are introduced.

As the author defines findability, it includes

Information architecture
Development
Marketing
Copywriting
Design
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Accessibility
Usability

He delves into each of those topics, giving concrete examples—often several examples—for ways to improve your site in terms of findability. The writing style is clear and often humorous. Some of the headings will serve as examples of the easy-going writing style used in the book: “The Deepest Desires of Search Engines” and “Web Standards and Findability Sitting in a Tree…” and “Final Notes: The Day Findability Saved the World.” That last one is actually a serious discussion about the spread of SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome).

Examples are easy to implement. In the chapter on Server-Side Strategies, he talks about the importance of file and folder names. He mentions that keywords in file and folder names should be separated with hyphens rather than underscores, so that each word is read individually by the search engines. The same chapter talks about cache, reducing http requests, and tools to analyze download speed such as YSlow—a Firefox extension.

In the chapter on Creating Content that Drives Traffic he covers the usual copywriting and keyword advice, but goes on to talk about developing content with RSS, and using RSS to create link libraries from del.icio.us or ma.gnolia.

In the chapter on Building a Findable Blog there are tips for titles, topics, summaries, and all sorts of blog plugins to build findability such as popular posts, recent posts, links for social networking sites, related posts. There’s a special section for WordPress blogs.

Other chapters talk about markup, adding search to your site, findability roadblocks, and mailing lists. The last chapter is interesting in that it takes all the ideas from the book and prioritizes them so that you can do the most effective first and work your way through them all in a sensible order.

Transparency disclosure: I met Aarron Walter at SXSWi this year and he convinced me to work on the Web Standards Project Education Task Force, where he is one of the leading voices. Nevertheless, I made every effort to evaluate this book objectively, and feel confident that my opinion is unbiased in terms of the value that people can get from this book.

Recommended

Where are all the new books?

I haven’t received a book on the topic of web design to review in a long time, January to be exact. Are all the books written? Is there nothing new to learn? Who is out there turning out new books for web designers?

Got a book of the type I like to review here? See if you can get your publisher to send it to me for review and I’ll take a look and write about it.

Review: Head First JavaScript

January 31, 2008 by

Virginia DeBolt
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Head First JavaScript

★★★★★ Head First JavaScript by Michael Morrison (O’Reilly, 2008) may not ring up five stars for everyone, but I like the Head First books. They appeal to the educator in me, the person who understands multiple intelligences and learning theory. The educator in me knows why these books work for a lot of people who can’t make sense out of a “normal” programming language manual.

The Head First books are not your average technical manual. They are full of redundancy, humor, images, practice exercises, goofy conversations between things like global and local variables and dumb questions.

I have to give this book credit for my first ever spontaneous JavaScript insight. After reading about one of the simpler JavaScript functions, I actually thought, “Oh, that’s how the Dreamweaver CSS dialog works.” Now, I’m not the sort of person who thinks in terms of JavaScript. I think in HTML. JavaScript has been something I do carefully and by slavishly copying someone else’s direction. So I must attribute my spontaneous JavaScript insight to the fact that the type of learning experience you get from a Head First book works in my brain.

Here’s what the chapters in the book discuss:

the interactive web
storing data
exploring the client
decision making
looping
functions
forms and validation
wrangling the page
bringing data to life
creating custom objects
kill bugs dead
dynamic data

If you’ve tried other JavaScript books and couldn’t get much out of them, try this Head First book. Recommended.

Technorati Tags: book review, Head First JavaScript

Ten Good Tech/Geek Books for Gift Giving

When it comes to buying gifts for the technology nut or geek in your life there is one thing you can be sure about. They need a constant stream of new information to keep up with advances in technology. Books fit the bill. Here are ten great tech/geek books you might give the geeks in your life.

Envisioning Information by Edward R. Tufte (Graphics Press, 1990) is a classic. This book is about visual thinking. It deals with the use of images to reason and learn. After 17 years in print, it is still the definitive book on the topic. The book costs about $41. Tufte is the author of other must-read techy books, too.

Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug (New Riders Press, 2005) is about web site usability. It clarifies many concepts about navigation, home page layout, good copy, and more. It’s short and easy to read, yet contains foundation concepts for web page usability. The cost is about $27.

Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century by Alex Steffen (Harry N. Abrams, 2006) is an absolutely packed, all-inclusive look what is going on right now to create an environmentally and economically sustainable future. Not everything in this book involves technology, but plenty of it does. And there are lots of tips you can use today to change the world. This book costs about $25.

In terms of software, any book with “The Missing Manual” in the title will tell you absolutely everything about a particular software application. The books in this series include everything from Photoshop to Dreamweaver to operating systems. The cost for Dreamweaver CS3: The Missing Manual is about $30. Other good titles for particular software are the “Bible” books, such as Dreamweaver CS3 Bible, which costs about $32.

The Best of MAKE by Mark Frauenfelder (Make Books, 2007) is do-it-yourself project heaven for techies and those with a bit of the engineer hidden in their psyche. The book comes from articles at MAKE Magazine or the companion website at Makezine.com. The book costs about $23.

The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web by Dave Shea and Molly E. Holzschlag (Peachpit Press, 2005) uses examples from the CSS Zen Garden site as the foundation for discussions on how to create beautiful, progressive CSS-based web sites. It’s an instructive look at the range of design methods made possible by CSS. This book costs about $30.

If your geek really wants to learn CSS, any book by Eric A. Meyer will be a good choice. His CSS: The Definitive Guide (O’Reilly Media, 2006) is now in its 3rd edition. It costs about $30. (I’d point out a couple of great HTML and CSS books by the author of this post, but hey, that would be self-serving.)

If your geek is design disabled, like me, any of Robin Williams’ books with Non-Designer in the title will be perfect. One such book is The Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin Williams (Peachpit Press, 2003). Her examples make learning design concepts very easy. This book costs about $20.

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg (Crown, 2007) is ostensibly about creating software, but is really more about people and culture and social behavior. The cost is about $17.

Color Design Workbook: A Real-World Guide to Using Color in Graphic Design by Noreen Morioka, Terry Stone Sean Adams (Rockport, 2006) is a workbook using real world exercises and case studies to help you learn about color. About $27.

Every book listed here is available from Amazon.com. The cost I mention is the cost for a new book at Amazon. Most local bookstores carry them or can order them, also.

Know of a great book I left out? Feel free to tell us about it.

Cross posted at BlogHer.

Review: Design Accessible Web Sites

Summary: A good resource

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Design Accessible Web Sites: 36 Keys to Creating Content for All Audiences and Platforms

Rating: 4/5

This book, by Jeremy J Sydik, is from the Pragmatic Bookshelf series (2007). It covers the full range of accessibility topics from basics such as introductions to the various types of disabilities to more complex topics such as scripts, accessible Flash, and understanding the guidelines.

I particularly like the Ten Principles for Web Accessibility in this book. The second principle, my favorite, is “Your users’ technologies are capable of sending and receiving text. That’s about all you’ll ever be able to assume.”

There are simple, no-nonsense descriptions and tips for testing, alt text, semantic HTML, captioning, tagging PDFs, scripting, and accessibility laws the world over. This book, in many ways, follows the same contents as Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance, but in a less pedantic and lighter way. You don’t get as much depth, but you do get a serviceable reference that would be good to have around.

Review: Dynamic Learning Dreamweaver CS 3

Reviewer: Virginia DeBolt

Summary: Out of date techniques

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Dynamic Learning Dreamweaver CS3

Rating: 1/5

There’s a series of Dynamic Learning books from O’Reilly and Aquent Graphics Institute (AGI). This one on Dreamweaver CS3 is a full-color, slickly designed book with video tutorials and project files on a CD. That’s the end of the good part of the review.

I know, I know—as long as Adobe keeps making Dreamweaver with tools that enable you to write font tags, design pages with tables and frames, and use all sorts of presentational HTML, someone has to write books about how to use Dreamweaver that way. This is one of those books. My great hope is that Adobe will get over it already.

When I first leafed through the book and saw the color and design details at a glance, I thought, “Wow, maybe this will be a good book to base a semester of Dreamweaver instruction on.” My initial glancing impression was way off. Please don’t use this book to teach anyone who hopes to present themselves as a professional how to use Dreamweaver. Here are a few of the things the book does.

refers to pixels as points
calls using a <strong> tag applying boldface, even while instructing the user to style the <strong> tag as italic
uses <font> tags and sets Preferences to add page property values as HTML presentational attributes of the <body> element throughout Chapters 1 and 2
teaches styles by having the user create a class for every individual text element on a page such as <p> and <li> elements
has a chapter on tables-based layouts but nothing on accessible data tables
doesn’t mention accessibility at all
has a chapter on frames
doesn’t mention that the indent icon creates a blockquote
the forms chapter doesn’t mention fieldsets and legends
the forms chapter doesn’t explain using <label> with for and id attributes

Maybe there are employers out there looking for designers who work this way and come to the local university in search of them. In my opinion, however, I think employers are looking for people trained in best practices. This book does not develop best practices.