Recommendation

A very good book.

My recommendation is that you check this book out at your local book store. My view is that it is a well designed book by a professional web designer/teacher.

If you are a beginner, but serious about web design, I think you'll likely want to get this book once you've seen it. In my opinion, it would be a very good book for most beginning web designers and for some experienced web designers too, if they want to review basics.

The book seems to be aimed at beginning web designers:

• who will be doing their web design on a MAC or under Windows (and not on Linux/Unix)
• who will be using a WYSIWYG web page design tool (such as Dreamweaver or Go Live)

I suggest you take this into account when you consider acquiring this book.

For more, see my detailed review.

George Woolley, Oakland.pm

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Learning Web Design, 2nd Edition
A Beginner's Guide to HTML, Graphics, and Beyond
By Jennifer Niederst
2nd Edition June 2003
0-596-00484-2, Order Number: 4842
488 pages, $39.95 US, $61.95 CA, £28.50 UK

Notes:

• Published by O'Reilly.
• The information above is taken from the O'Reilly catalog entry.
• Click on the image above, to see the catalog entry.

Layout

• 9 3/4" x 8" (i.e. significantly larger than most O'Reilly books)
• 421 pages for the 4 parts
• the book itself is an example of really good design
• readable type
• excellent use of graphics for showing HTML, what you'll see, explanatory diagrams, etc.
• test exercises at the end of each chapter

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Chapter Titles

Part I. Getting Started

• 1. Where Do I Start?
• 2. How the Web Works
• 3. Getting Your Page on the Web
• 4. Why Web Design Isn't Like Print Design
• 5. The Web Design Process

Part II. Learning HTML

• 6. Creating a Simple Page (HTML Overview)
• 7. Formatting Text with HTML
• 8. Formatting Text with Style Sheets
• 9. Adding Graphic Elements
• 10. Adding Links
• 11. Tables
• 12. Frames
• 13. Color on the Web

Part III. Creating Web Graphics

• 14. All About Web Graphics
• 15. Creating GIFs
• 16. Creating JPEGs
• 17. Animated GIFs
• 18. Slicing and Rollovers

Part IV. Form and Function

• 19. Web Design Techniques
• 20. Building Usable Websites
• 21. Web Dos and Don'ts
• 22. How'd They do That

Note:

• You can take a look at the full table of contents, if you wish.

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Sample Tag Counts

a tag   occurs   634 times
b tag   occurs   148 times
body tag   occurs   28 times
br tag   occurs   67 times
h1 tag   occurs   1 time 
h2 tag   occurs   253 times
h3 tag   occurs   12 times
h4 tag   occurs   46 times
head tag   occurs   28 times
hr tag   occurs   57 times
html tag   occurs   28 times
i tag   occurs   1 time 
img tag   occurs   53 times
li tag   occurs   857 times
link tag   occurs   28 times
meta tag   occurs   68 times
p tag   occurs   702 times
pre tag   occurs   11 times
span tag   occurs   23 times
table tag   occurs   30 times
td tag   occurs   155 times
th tag   occurs   13 times
title tag   occurs   28 times
tr tag   occurs   67 times
ul tag   occurs   225 times

Notes:

• Above are the counts for all the HTML tags that occurred on this site at a particular point in time.
• All of these tags are covered in this book except the meta tag, which the author explicitly says is beyond the scope of the book. There is, however, a section on meta tags in the author's more advanced book, "Web Design in a Nutshell".
• This book also doesn't address tags related to forms. However, there is a whole chapter on them in the author's more advanced Nutshell book.

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Software I Use on Linux

• browsers: Netscape, Mozilla, Opera, Konqueror
• editing HTML: vi
• editing graphics: The Gimp
• uploading/downloading: scp
• editing onsite: ssh
• applets: Java
• cgi: Perl
• various support functions: Perl, Perl/Tk

Notes:

• Above are the main software tools I use for web design on Linux.
• Why this list of tools? Because this review was written for Oakland.pm, that is, Oakland Perl Mongers. Perl is an open source computer language which works best on Linux/Unix. I anticipate that a significant number of readers of this review will be Linux/Unix users. And this book provides little information specific to doing web design on Linux/Unix.
• Are these the right tools for you? Even if you are a Linux/Unix user, these may not be the right tools for you. But I bet you do use Gimp. Anyway, to identify the right tools for you, if you are a Linux/Unix user, I suggest (a) doing searches on the web, (b) trying out software on your Linux distribution, and (c) joining a relevant user group(s) with a mailing list, participating in it, and asking for advice.

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Contents

• The Title
• The Author
• About the Reviewer
• What Did I Like?
• Some Things I'd Like Different
• Some Final Thoughts

The Title

In this section of the review, I examine what the title means, starting by focusing on key words occurring in it.

As far as I can tell, this book doesn't belong to one of the various series of O'Reilly books. [In particular, no cute little animals here. :( ] So I won't look to O'Reilly conventions for guidance in understanding the title.

What's Web Design? We're talking here about website design. The author points out that this can involve:

• graphic design
• information design
• interface design
• HTML and graphics production
• programming and scripting
• multimedia

She tells us you don't need to be proficient at all of these (or even most of them) to be a web designer.

In fact, you can get along fine without learning any programming or scripting languages at all. But you do, for sure, need to learn HTML.

Learning in what sense? The author's earlier book "Web Design in a Nutshell" is comprehensive and provides detailed explanations for intermediate and professional web designers. This book aims to provide a fairly raw beginner with a prequel to that book.

What's a Beginner? How raw a beginner? The author does assume that:

• The reader knows his/her way around a computer.
• The reader is familiar with the web.

What's a Guide? A personal guide would be someone who leads the way and explains whatever needs to be explained. I suppose a book would be a guide for beginning web designers if it made clear the direction one needs to go to be become a web designer and if it provided explanations of key web design matters appropriate for a beginner.

What's HTML? HyperText Markup Language is the language used to created web page documents. Or more concretely, HTML consists of all those tags that you see in web documents if you View Source. For example,

• <h1> which indicates a highest level heading
• <p> which indicates a paragraph
• <em> which indicates emphasis

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are treated as an adjunct to HTML. So what's CSS? The basic idea of CSS is to allow you to separate considerations of styling and appearance from considerations of structure and content. With CSS you can:

• tailor the effect of different HTML tags to your stylistic purpose
• have different classes of the same tag with different appearances
• and much more.

What kind of Graphics? Images that occur on the web, such as GIFs and JPEGs.

What does Beyond encompass? Beyond covers a wide range of other subjects that even a beginner should be at least familiar with.

How well does the book fit the title? Really well. If you master this book, you'll certainly be ready to produce serviceable web pages and make use of "Web Design in a Nutshell". The second Part of the the book addresses learning HTML, including style sheets for good measure. The third Part addresses what you need to know about web graphics. And the fourth Part goes beyond basic HTML and graphics to

• explain how to do some neat web design tricks
• give an overview of some basic issues of usability
• provide an annotated list of web design dos and don'ts, and
• briefly explore audio, video, Flash, DHTML and XHTML.

The book does indeed point the way to the promised land of web design. And the author goes to great lengths to communicate the things that the aspiring web designer needs to know.

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The Author

Jennifer Niederst began her design career in print design. She began doing web design in 1993. She was one of the first web designers. She designed the first commercial website, Global Network Navigator.

I'm aware of two other books by the author that are currently in print:

• Web Design in a Nutshell
• HTML Pocket Reference

She also teaches workshops and does lectures on various topics related to web design.

For more information about her, see her website, www.littlechair.com

Notes:

• To see the catalog entry for a book, click on the corresponding image.
• Hey, both of these books have cute little animals on their covers!

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About the Reviewer

Here's some things about me that may be worth taking into account when reading this review.

web design experience:

• I've constructed and maintained many websites.
• I believe everyone who wants one should have a website.
• I don't think constructing a web site needs to be hard.
• I'm not a professional web designer.
• I haven't built any commercial websites.

training experience:

• I've done a lot of development of self-teach technical books and courses.
• I haven't created any such courses concerning web design or HTML

software development experience:

• I have many years experience as a software developer.
• I'm a strong advocate of Open Source.

operating system experience:

• Currently, I do almost all my website and software development on Linux.

experience with O'Reilly:

• My most used technical books are all O'Reilly books.
• I'm a big supporter of O'Reilly.

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What Did I Like?

In my opinion, this really is a very good guide for a beginning web designer. As a guide, it's professional, yet conversational in tone, and it's filled with valuable information that a beginning web designer should know or at least have easy access to.

The scope of the book is impressive. The student will learn the basics of HTML and of web graphics and much more. I'm not aware of anything pressing that the author has left out. For example, she even gives good coverage to information design, which would be easy (but unfortunate) to skip over.

I particularly like the coordination between this book and "Web Design in a Nutshell". The correspondence is almost one to one for Part II of "Learning Web Design". For example, here's the mapping of the first four chapters in Part II to chapters in "Web Design in a Nutshell".

I believe this close connection should be most helpful to the aspiring web designer.

The author began her career in print design and she uses her knowledge effectively to teach web design in a print medium. The layout of the book and her use of graphic aids show an impressive level of mastery. Hopefully students of this book will be inspired to create web sites that serve their purposes that well.

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Some Things I'd Like Different

The author provides suggestions and examples that are directly aimed at Windows and MAC OS users. Rarely, if ever, does she do the same regarding Linux. This is certainly understandable, but it makes the book somewhat less useful for me, and, I think, also for many of the readers of this review. Then again, most Linux users can find out about these things by asking around. Hey, people in the Linux community tend to be pathologically cooperative. Beside, why do I need anything but GIMP and vi? ;-)

The author provides a good and concise introduction to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). But while she puts forth the ideal that HTML should deal with the basic information structure and matters of style should be left to style sheets, her treatment of HTML doesn't encourage this. Then again, if you are going to deal with other people's HTML, I guess you better get used to HTML code that ignores style sheets or uses them superficially.

In one particular instance, I thought the author exhibited a dry sense of humor. If humor is in the author's repertoire, it would be much appreciated, at least by this reader. Hey, I can wish, OK?

Some Final Thoughts

Well, there are a few things I wish were different. But the bottom line is this is a really good book on web design.

If you are a beginning web designer, I suggest you stop by your local book store and look through this book. I think you'll likely want to get it.

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