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Web Design Garage

Posted by timothy on from the sounds-like-a-winner dept.

jsuda (John Suda) writes "Web Design Garage is a remarkably clear-headed, concisely-written and feature-rich book about contemporary web-design topics. It is part of a "Garage" series of hip-looking, style-laden books published by Prentice Hall (Prentice Hall Professional Technical Reference -- PH PTR) and is targeted at the "garage" level designer: small business professionals, hobbyists, and technophiles. It assumes some modest familiarity of HTML and working with Javascript." Read on for the rest of Suda's review.

Web Design Garage author Marc Campbell pages 530 publisher Prentice Hall PTR rating 8 reviewer John Suda ISBN 0131481991 summary Hands-on Guide to web design and usability

This is not a primer, tutorial, or concept-bound book. It is meant to provide practical guidance and solutions to the most common Web design issues dealt with by Web designers. Author Marc Campbell, offers a set of 86 topics about Web design problems and solutions. The format for nearly all of the 86 topics is to highlight a design challenge, then offer solutions using pictures, examples, and code snippets. Although a good and quick read from beginning to end, the book can be read piecemeal for information and guidance on a specific issue. One can pick and choose topics depending on interest or need.

There are no traditional chapters, only a set of design topics of relatively short length organized into 8 general categories. Those categories include design and usability topics, layout, images, text, links, forms, and two others -- one of miscellaneous items, the other an explanation of basic Web-design material. There is also an index and a short glossary of HTML, CSS, Web, and graphics-related terms.

The fundamental theme of the book is that design and usability are, or should be, the same thing. Usability is paramount, of course, but the author's approach to Web design emphasizes creating a "sense of place": good design unites pages so that they look like they belong together.

This is not an earth-shattering idea, but like most of all of the design treatments, the goal is to design pages which make it easy for visitors to use the site. Many good design virtues are virtually invisible to the casual user. There is a confluence of design and usability; it's only when a design element doesn't work well that it comes to the attention of the user, and that's something to avoid. The author shows by example how design and usability are intertwined.

There are a handful of themes which guide the book. Admirably, the author emphasizes for every design element a concern for accessibility. Many of the design guides refer to accessibility by screen-readers and non-graphic browsers. A second major concern is for compliance with contemporary Web design standards as those promulgated by the World Wide Web Consortium. Consequently, there is much emphasis on the separation of page structure from content, where CSS is used for structure and HTML is used for content. A contrast of HTML and CSS formatting is highlighted in many of the chapters.

There is a large handful of sections which express HTML and CSS formatting differences on page layout, text and image positioning, and other Web design elements. There is clear discussion on how to work with Javascript and stylesheets. The emphasis is on "forward-looking" coding, i.e., clean, standards-compliant, and accessibility conscious. Campbell offers an experienced designer's insights on choices to be made in design components. There is much value for both inexperienced and seasoned designers.

Each topic is richly expressed with clear and straightforward text, illustrations, screenshots, and sidebars on a variety of related matters. There are sidebars throughout titled "FAQs" and "Geekspeak," explaining concepts or terminology for the less-knowledgeable reader. Then there are those called "Tips" which usually offer an insight to practical problems, especially dealing with browser-compatibility issues. There are many useful tables and charts indexing specific tag attributes, with examples. In addition, and most useful, are the "Toolkits" which are sample code snippets. It would have been nice to have the code snippets available for downloading from the publisher's Web site.

This is a dense volume containing all sorts of information useful for the "garage" web designer. For some reason, the depth and weight of the content is reflected in the book itself, which is remarkably heavy, weighing in at a well-produced 29 ounces.

There are many books available on basic Web design, but this one is unusually clear and well-expressed. This is the type of book one keeps handy in the bookshelf next to the computer to access for quick solutions to everyday Web design problems.

You can purchase Web Design Garage from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

10 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. This is just another tutorial. by dteichman2 · · Score: 2, Informative

    I just looked at the table of contents. This seems like just another average HTML/CSS/Javascript tutorial/primer. It's geared toward quick results, and is possibly a good refrence if you tend to forget things, but it's in no way a book that a web developer would want.

    --


    Silence is golden... and duct tape is silver.
  2. Designing With Web Standards by Mariani · · Score: 5, Informative

    Reading this review, instantaniously Designing With Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman sprang to mind. It has also been reviewed on slashdot here.

    I don't want to be looking down on the book by saying this but judging by the review it sounds like Web Design Garage is kind of a light version.

  3. Imagine my surprise by doombob · · Score: 3, Informative

    Well, I was looking for books with black and white animals on the covers and then I saw this. Needless to say, you can't judge a book by its cover. I found it to actually have useful real-world solutions to actual problems I have had in the past. I thought it would be useless and unprofessional, but it was not. It was also the least expensive web-development-related book in the major book chain store through which I was browsing.

  4. Re:I'll take content over "hip-looking, style-lade by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    eMpTy-V

    MTV

    Get it?

  5. XMLHttpRequest? by sean23007 · · Score: 1, Informative

    I was hoping this book would have some valuable information about the XmlHttpRequest object, which is used by Google Suggest, GMail, and other sites around the web. Unfortunately, there is a dearth of information about it available on the internet. The way I see it, unless your site is going to be very simple, this is a technology you should definitely be using for all future projects ... I'm doing all I can with it, but there isn't any good info on it. Does anyone have links?

    --

    Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
    1. Re:XMLHttpRequest? by Narcocide · · Score: 2, Informative

      a brief overview i found pretty useful: apple.com

    2. Re:XMLHttpRequest? by hyperstation · · Score: 2, Informative

      this was in my bookmarks. you can use the HTTP request to call a script (in turn accessing a database), or whatever else you want to do...

  6. If you need an HTML/CSS/XML primer by fontkick · · Score: 5, Informative

    Visit:

    http://www.w3schools.com/

    Good stuff, easy to navigate, covers the basics, free.

  7. Cool Factor . . . by Java+Ape · · Score: 3, Informative
    The "garage" books caught my eye at a local bookstore -- definately very stylish looking. However, after spending a half-hour or so browsing the tome, I was left feeling like it lacked focus. As the orignal reviewer indicated, it isn't a tutorial, cookbook, or referece, it seemed to wander through topics, somtimes giving very detailed examples, and sometimes doing vague arm-waving sketches of major concepts. For my money, I think O'Reilly does a remarkable job of delivering content efficiently and accurately.

    On the other hand the w3.org maintains a bang-up bunch of white-papers on all web-related technologies. Nothing say's nerd like volumes of loose-leaf white papers falling out of your attache case . . .

  8. Re:I'll take content over "hip-looking, style-lade by timmyd · · Score: 2, Informative

    I'm writing a paper on web accessibility for an ethics class this semester, while it's still in its infancy, I have some things I can share with you.

    Are you aware that "The U.S. Census Bureau says that
    more 49.7 million people have a disability or some sort of long
    lasting condition. Of these 49.7 million people, 9.3 million have a
    hearing or vision disability and 12.4 million of them have a condition
    related to cognition or difficulty in learning"? Due to advances in health, the world population is getting older and 53 percent of the people with disabilities in the US are 65 and older.

    And are you aware that about 71 out of the fortune 100 web sites according to one experiment have a severe web accessibility error (priorty 1) according to Bobby (web accessibility checker)?

    And there are only so many things that validation sites can check--what if a site uses a a color theme that is nearly impossible for color-blind users? Fortunately, it's possible to design an accessible website that looks good also.