WebDesignBookReview Archives - Page 11 of 21

Review: Accelerated DOM Scripting with Ajax, APIs, and Libraries

Reviewer: Virginia DeBolt

Summary: very useful

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Accelerated DOM Scripting with Ajax, APIs, and Libraries (Pro)

Rating: 5/5

Accelerated DOM Scriptiing with Ajax, APIs, and Libraries is from Apress (2007). The book is mainly by Jonathan Snook, with additional chapters from Aaron Gustafson, Stuart Langridge and Dan Webb. Each of the additional chapters provides an example case demonstrating the techniques described by Snook throughout the book.

Snook is an excellent writer. Economical with words (this is a small book), but absolutely clear and easy to understand. Programming is not my subject. So much of this book was beyond my expertise. However, there were many parts of the book that do fall within my expertise, and I was highly impressed with the explanation, clarity, and philosophy behind the ideas that Snook included.

Chapters included JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and object-oriented programming. These were not basic level material, but were high-level explanations as to how these technologies work together in Ajax and JavaScript. The chapter on libraries listed the best choices. The chapter on visual effects talked about building animation objects. The three demonstration chapters covered form validation, a FAQ facelift, and a dynamic help system.

Book Review: Web Design and Marketing Solutions for Business Websites

Web Design and Marketing Solutions for Business Websites by Kevin Potts (friends of ED, 2007) focuses on corporate web sites. Potts discusses such basics as what you should expect a site promoting a product or service to do. He explains what content to include and the type of writing and support a corporate site should provide.

Potts stresses the importance of accessibility—not just for the vision impaired, but all kinds of accessibility issues. This, as you can imagine, makes points with me in favor of the book. He details issues related to markup, color, navigation, forms, tables, graphics and multimedia.

There’s an entire chapter on what to do with the home page. There’s another entire chapter on what should happen in a corporate About section. He covers customer support, a corporate blog, search engine optimization, and online advertising.

I have no experience teaching marketing classes for corporate web designers, so I hesitate to flat out state that this might be a helpful book for that. However, it seems to cover the basics to me. I think the people who will get the most out of this book are the people working as consultants or within a corporate environment who have the task of creating a successful corporate marketing site.

Technorati Tags: web design, Web Design and Marketing Solutions, Book Review

Review: High Performance Web Sites

Summary: increase your loading speed

Sep 28, 2007 by

Web Teacher

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High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers

★★★★ This book from O’Reilly (2007) is by Steve Souders. Souders is the chief performance guru at Yahoo! and knows how to make a web site display more quickly.

This isn’t the type of book you would use as a class text. However, its a useful reference. It is billed as “Essential Knowledge for Frontend Engineers” but any web site owner can benefit from the 14 “rules” Souders provides for faster download speed.

A sampling of the 14 steps Souders suggests inlcude making fewer HTTP requests, gzipping components, putting scripts at the bottom, avoiding redirects, and making Ajax cacheable.

The final chapter of the book deconstructs 10 top sites. This includes such high traffic destinations as Amazon, eBay, and MySpace. A very interesting chapter.

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Technorati Tags: web design, Book Reviews, High Performance Web Sites

Review: Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP

Summary: a complete course

Sep 5, 2007 by

Web Teacher

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The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP

★★★★★ The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP by David Powers is from Friends of ED (2007). The book is a replacement for Powers’ earlier book, Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8, but largely revised, rewritten, and with new chapters. The new Spry widgets in CS3 are covered in several chapters.

I very much like the approach taken to most topics in this book. The author takes a look at the underlying XHTML, talks about how to keep things accessible, and warns you when things are not best practice, or still in development (as a number of the Spry widgets are) or just plain a bad idea.

As you could gather from the title, there is more to this book than just a run through the ways you use Dreamweaver to put text on a page. You find out how to set up for PHP, how to install a MySQL database, and how to use phpMyAdmin.

In the CSS chapter, Powers supports concepts I’ve preached for quite some time, such as to stay away from the Property inspector for fonts. There is a whole chapter on modifiying one of the built-in CSS layouts that are included in Dreamweaver CS3.

There are several chapters dealing with data, data tables, data access, searching data.

This is a very complete, helpful book to anyone who wants to learn more about Dreamweaver CS3 and use it to maintain dynamic, database driven sites. It is not for the complete novice with Dreamweaver.

If I were teaching a Dreamweaver course on a level that included working with databases, I would be quite happy to use this book. It’s thorough, it supports standards and best practices, and it’s clearly written.

0.3

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Review: The CSS Anthology

Summary: A handy resource

Aug 27, 2007 by

Web Teacher

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The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks and Hacks

★★★★ Rachel Andrew’s 2nd edition of The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks, and Hacks is now available from Sitepoint. The book is essentially a reference, the sort of volume you grab when you need a specific answer quickly. It uses the question and answer technique.

The 101 tips cover a wide range of CSS information. A random selection of questions include:

How do I add borders to images?

How do I make a horizontal menu using CSS and lists?

How do I add a border to a table without using the HTML border attribute?

How do I hide some CSS from a particular browser?

How do I decide when to use a class and when to use an ID?

The book is in full color, which is nice, even if not entirely necessary. There a web site where a reader can download all the code used in the book.

The tips advocate best practices. Each answer is clear, concise but complete, and ready to be used. All in all, a useful reference.

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Review: Dreamweaver CS3: The Missing Manual

Summary: tells all

Jul 15, 2007 by

Web Teacher

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Dreamweaver CS3: The Missing Manual

★★★★★ This book is by David Sawyer McFarland, published by O’Reilly in 2007. I have some favorite books about Dreamweaver that I’ve recommended as teaching texts. This is the everything book about Dreamweaver. It gives you all the basic introduction to the software, using the Design View for formatting, using CSS and such that you find in most books. But it also includes chapters on databases, recordsets, database records and server behaviors. It tells you how to do everything Dreamweaver can do.

I like the fact that the author gives you the information on how to do things using standards. If something is explained that isn’t using Dreamweaver according the best practices, the author tells you that, too. A reader would come away with information about how to use the software in the most standards-compliant way. This is not always the case with Dreamweaver books, and is one of the best features about this one.

It costs more than the Dreamweaver books that don’t include material for database and dynamic site users, so if you don’t need those functions, try one of the less complete books. Recommended.

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Technorati Tags: web design, book reviews, Dreamweaver

Review: Pro CSS and HTML Design Patterns

Jun 16, 2007 by

Web Teacher
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Pro CSS and HTML Design Patterns

Summary: use with intelligence

★★★☆☆ Michael Bowers wrote this book (Apress, 2007) to provide design patterns in web designs that the book cover states will “increase creavitiy and productivity.” While design patterns can indeed save you time and effort, I both love and hate the way the book goes about providing the patterns.

First I’ll tell you about how the book works, and then explain why I have mixed feelings about it.

There are over 350 patterns in the book. Included are such patterns as creating conditional stylesheets, right-alignment of elements, treating block elements as inline elements, creating equal sized content columns, making drop caps, displaying callouts and over 300 other patterns. For each pattern, you get suggested HTML and the CSS to create the pattern from the provided HTML.

The author suggests that you take the reusable patterns and “simply drop them into your code.” While I think that the patterns are a valuable aid in helping web designers solve specific design problems, I have a problem with the idea of just dropping the book’s code directing into your page.

My problem is that almost every pattern uses a class. That class is assigned to every HTML element involved. A major erruption of classitis would result if some intelligence wasn’t used to adapt the patterns.

A reader with a background in CSS, who could see how to use the CSS needed to create the design element with intelligence would make best use of this book. With appropriate CSS savvy, a user could adapt the CSS pattern so that it could be applied to a page using descendent selectors instead of with an omnipresent application of classes.

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