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May 17, 2004
Web design books I found useful
Most computer books are crap. I speak from the experience of reading many and having a part in writing a few. For some reason this is especially true with HTML books. (I know, grammar police, I know, there are no gradations of "true". Leave me alone.) It seems like the authors are faced with the decision of whether to write a how to or an encyclopedia and they either write an encyclopedia, which is useless if you don't know what you don't know, or they just give up and write a hybrid of the two that is impossible to navigate and largely inane.
There are two glaring exceptions that I found immensely useful in the last redesign of this site, when I was doing all XHTML, without any content management software. (Wow, the stone age.) I highly recommend them both to anyone who is doing the same. Even if you do use a tool like movable type, you still want to know what the HTML code is doing and how to design a site, so I still recommend them.
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The Visual Quickstart Guide HTML for the World Wide Web is so much better than any other first book on the subject that it's kind of amazing. If you walk through this book step by step you will have a professional looking web site at the other end. No doubt. Castro's writing is clear and friendly, and the book, while not a complete resourse guide to HTML, tells you everything you need to know. This is a must buy. |
The next book you might want is The Unusually Useful Web Book by June Cohen. And if you have commercial aspirations for your site, you might want to buy and skim it first, since it makes some suggestions about web site design and other choices you may want to make before you build your site. This book is a combination of web design and business planning, with lots of ideas from "real" professional web designers. Sort of a "here's what we've learned really works and doesn't from the trenches" style. Lots of very useful advice if a bit repetative. |
Posted by mtprose at May 17, 2004 05:01 PM