Learning Web Design: A Beginner's Guide to (X)HTML, StyleSheets, and Web Graphics

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Description

Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Number Of Pages:
Publication Date: 2007-06-29
Sales Rank: 9917
ISBN / ASIN: 0596527527
EAN: 9780596527525
Binding: Paperback
Manufacturer: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Studio: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Average Rating: 4.5

Everything you need to know to create professional web sites is right here. Learning Web Design starts from the beginning -- defining how the Web and web pages work -- and builds from there. By the end of the book, you'll have the skills to create multi-column CSS layouts with optimized graphic files, and you'll know how to get your pages up on the Web.

This thoroughly revised edition teaches you how to build web sites according to modern design practices and professional standards. Learning Web Design explains:

How to create a simple (X)HTML page, how to add links and images
Everything you need to know about web standards -- (X)HTML, DTDs, and more
Cascading Style Sheets -- formatting text, colors and backgrounds, using the box model, page layout, and more
All about web graphics, and how to make them lean and mean through optimization
The site development process, from start to finish
Getting your pages on the Web -- hosting, domain names, and FTP
The book includes exercises to help you to learn various techniques, and short quizzes to make sure you're up to speed with key concepts. If you're interested in web design, Learning Web Design is the place to start.

Review:

up to date discussion

Perhaps it is apropos that for a book on web page design, the pages are quite prettily laid out. With an appealing mix between the text and the illustrations. Adds to the pleasure of reading and (hopefully) learning.

One change from books on web design from just a few years ago is the inclusion here of different browsing environments. Not just different browsers for the desktop personal computer, which might be your first thought. The important new thing is a mention of designing pages for the mobile Web. Which, in practice, means cellphones. Sadly, the mention is just that. All too brief; half a page. Given the growing economic importance of the mobile Web, the author should seriously consider a strong expansion of this topic in any future edition of the book.

Other parts of the book do show an up to date understanding of web design. Including a useful sidebar of deprecated elements in XHTML. Like applet, center, and font. Try to adhere to these recommendations, by not using the elements in your new pages.

There is a chapter explaining how to put links into your page. Links are of course what really makes the Web so powerful. There could have been a quick explanation of why you should carefully ponder what you write in the anchor text of a link. Search engines often use the contents of the anchor text as an important input into their weighting schemes for your pages. In other words, it behooves you to write as meaning a text as possible. Helps in the search engine optimisation.

Review:

I wish this had been around when I first started web design...

It's been awhile since I've taken a look at what passes for a beginning web development book these days. I decided to examine Learning Web Design: A Beginner's Guide to (X)HTML, StyleSheets, and Web Graphics (3rd edition) by Jennifer Niederst Robbins. All I want to know is... why weren't books like this around when I was trying to learn this stuff?

Contents:
Part 1 - Getting Started: Where Do I Start?; How the Web Works; The Nature of Web Design
Part 2 - HTML Markup for Structure: Creating a Simple Page (HTML Overview); Marking up Text; Adding Links; Adding Images; Basic Table Markup; Forms; Understanding the Standards
Part 3 - CSS For Presentation: Cascading Style Sheets Orientation; Formatting Text (Plus More Selectors); Colors and Backgrounds (Plus Even More Selectors and External Style Sheets); Thinking Inside the Box (Padding, Borders, and Margins); Floating and Positioning; Page Layout with CSS; CSS Techniques
Part 4 - Creating Web Graphics: Web Graphics Basics; Lean and Mean Web Graphics
Part 5 - From Start to Finish: The Site Development Process; Getting Your Pages on the Web
Appendix A - Answers; Appendix B - CSS 2.1 Selectors; Index

The first clue that things were different is that it's a full color book. So not only can the code examples be color-coded for clarity, but you don't get black-and-white graphics that attempt to illustrate a full-color web page. Next, covering XHTML and CSS together means that the reader gets the correct foundation for how to separate content from structure. I personally still have a bad habit of using HTML tags instead of using CSS like I really should. Had I had Robbins' book when I first learned, I'm inclined to think I'd have fewer bad habits to get rid of. Finally, she hits a sweet spot in covering issues like browser quirks and incompatibilities. It's not so in-depth that the beginner gets lost, yet it's detailed enough that even those who have been doing web work for some time will likely pick up or rediscover a few things they didn't know or had forgotten.

For those working through the book as a tutorial, there are plenty of exercises that reinforce the skills you've acquired. After going through the material, there should be very little in the way of HTML and CSS coding that won't make sense. The only part of web design that this book doesn't cover is JavaScript. So if you're coming to this book hoping to learn how to make your page dynamic and interactive via scripting, you'll go away disappointed. Personally, I think it was a wise decision to leave that out. The target audience is more likely to want to build a basic page with static content to get started. Throwing programming skills at them might be enough to confuse and discourage, which would be a shame. There's more than enough material here with HTML and CSS to get plenty of value for your book buying dollar.

I have a colleague at work who is dipping her toe into the world of web design. She asked me if I knew of any good books to get her started. I'll be shipping my copy to her, as I'm quite confident this will be exactly what she needs...

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