Category: WebDesignBookReview

Flash 8 Cookbook (O’Reilly, 2006) by Joey Lott with Jeffrey Bardzell, Ezra Freedman, Kris Honeycutt and Robert Reinhardt is one of the O’Reilly coolbook series. These books approach the topic as a series of tiny tasks, which they call problems. The solution to each problem is suggested with step-by-step instructions about how to do whatever is suggested. Each problem and solution is a “recipe,” thus the cookbook metaphor. Sometimes there is more than one way to solve a problem. When that happens, each option is explained.

Every aspect of Flash 8 is included. Tools, Libraries, Action Scripts, Variables: whatever it takes is explained. There’s a chapter on “Deploying Flash on Mobile Devices” and one on “Making Movies Accessible.”

This is not the kind of book you go through to learn Flash as a beginner. It’s the kind of book you keep on the shelf and pull out 18 times a week because it quickly explains how to do the one thing you are struggling with at the moment. It’s the kind of book you open first to the Index, then find a page, read for a minute or two, and bingo! you know how to do what you’re trying to do.

I find the clear, easy to understand writing in this book admirable. I know how hard it is to do, and it’s done very well here.

It isn’t a book you could build a semester’s projects around, but I definitely recommend it as a valuable classroom resource and a reference-ya-gotta-have for Flash 8 users who’ve mastered the basics.

Technorati Tags: web design, accessibility, education, web design education

Next week is TV-Turnoff Week. Welcome to TV Turnoff Network If you participate, I have some suggested reading that you can use to fill your time. Here are three books you may not have tried yet. They are more in the realm of high-level thinking about web design than nitty gritty details.

• The Non-Designer’s Design Book, 2nd Ed
• Don’t Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
• The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web

If that doesn’t do it for you, I can recommend one more book that will give you plenty of details, projects, and hands-on work with CSS. The book? More Eric Meyer on CSS

Technorati Tags: web design, usability, CSS

Bulletproof Web Design : Improving flexibility and protecting against worst-case scenarios with XHTML and CSS by Dan Cederholm (New Riders, 2006) makes me long for a Dan Cederholm fan club to join. The book is clear, well-illustrated, easy to use and provides helpful information. It’s landing high on my recommended list.

Cederholm’s explanation of bulletproof is that pages are flexible enough to be readable in many circumstances. Bulletproof pages are based on Web standards, use sensible markup and separate presentation from content. He takes a component approach through most of the book, looking at a small section of a page such as scalable navigation or expandable rows. He examines the way it’s commonly done, then suggests a cleaner and more flexible bulletproof way to accomplish the same thing. In the final chapter, he puts it all together in a complete page.

Many of his bulletproof solutions involve floats. He also uses several hacks. I’m not going to debate the merits of these choices. He explains his solutions and choices quite well in the book. His results are elegant and stand up to the bulletproof test, and he makes no claim that his choices are the only correct choices.

Many of his solutions involve clever use of two or more background images. (Cederholm was the originator of the faux columns concept published originally on A List Apart, an early and widely used solution to the problem of unequal columns based on floats.) He’s the author of another influential book promoting standards, Web Standards Solutions, and owns the site Simple Bits.

Topics addressed include sizing text, scalable navigation, vertical expansion, float-based grids, flexible boxes, table styles, and fluid layouts. This book is a must have addition to your web design library.

Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML by Elisabeth Freeman and Eric Freeman is from O’Reilly’s Head First series. The teacher in me has burned with curiosity about Head First books for some time now, but this is the first Head First book on a topic I feel competent to comment about.

If you’ve looked into my past and examined my writing credits, you know I wrote some books a few years back that involved a lot of work with multiple intelligences. My assumption about the Head First books was that there would be an emphasis on multiple intelligences. I guessed right, but I also fell short.

The book uses humor, goofy word play, unexpected juxtapositions of ideas, stories, clever visuals and diagrams and several different types of activities and quizzes to create what they call a brain friendly way to learn. I attempted reading it with fresh eyes, as if I knew nothing about HTML, and I found their technique to be clear and their explanations made material easy to learn. Because they are using repetition and creating numerous activities and exercises for practicing on each new bit of information, I think new information would be easy to remember. Easy to learn, easy to remember—a winning combination. They also made points with me by using standards, good coding practices, and CSS from the very first.

I don’t know if O’Reilly is targeting an academic market with the Head First books, but this one seems much better suited to the individual learner than to the requirements of a classroom situation. So I cannot recommend it as a text to base a semester around, but I certainly recommend it as a book for individual students to use as a reference, resource, and tool. I recommend that teachers have it on their shelf for the same reasons. Teachers will find some clever new ways to present ideas in this book.

This is no serious-toned technical manual. This is play. If you don’t want to play, you’ll be insulted by it.