Category: WebDesignBookReview

More Eric Meyer on CSS is the latest book from the world-recognized guru of CSS, Eric Meyer. It is from New Riders Voices that Matter series.

This book is so much fun! I don’t know when I have had such a good time reading a book. Reading it is like finding a small door to a hidden tunnel that whisks you into the brain of Eric Meyer. But unlike the movie “Being John Malkovich,” the magical tunnel doesn’t allow you to enter Eric Meyer’s brain and take it over. It allows Eric Meyer to take over your brain, revealing his thought process, his problem solving style, his design approach, his knowledge. No, More Eric Meyer on CSS is not the magical realism of the movies. It is the practical application of CSS to solve real-world design requirements.

The book is not for CSS beginners. The assumption is that you know the basics and that something like
#sidebar h4, #sidebar ul {margin: 0 6px 0 0;}
already makes sense to you. Meyer takes on ten design projects. They are: converting an existing page, styling a photo collection, styling a financial report, positioning in the background, list-based menus, CSS-driven drop-down menus, opening the doors to attractive tabs, styling a weblog, designing a home page, and designing in the garden (the CSS Zen Garden, that is). For each project, Meyer provides the design requirements, sets you up with images and files, and then works through each one of the design problems and shows you one (or several) methods of using CSS to meet the requirement.

During one phase of my career, I had a couple of contracting jobs at IBM and was struck by the awesome reverence the programmers had for those rare programming stars among them who wrote “elegant” code. No false trails, no unneeded loop-de-loops, just graceful effective code. Meyer writes CSS like that–graceful and elegant–and you get to be inside his brain as he does it. You get to go though it with him, think his graceful and elegant thoughts–soak in them, bask in them, learn to use them for your own design requirements. I repeat myself and say that this book was fun to read and do.

Do I recommend this book? Yeah, about 110%.

Digital Media Tools by Nigel Chapman and Jenny Chapman from Wiley Publishing is one of Wiley’s many educational books aimed at university level courses. This book includes chapters about Flash, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, ImageReady, Illustrator and Premiere. It doesn’t attempt to create expert users, but covers the basics of what each program does and how to use it. It would be a good text for an overview course or an introductory course.

An unusual characteristic of this book is that it covers two versions of each program. In this second edition from 2002 (the third edition is scheduled for 2005) the Dreamweaver chapters cover Dreamweaver 4 and Dreamweaver MX in two separate chapters. There is a chapter for Illustrator 9 and Illustrator 10, and similar inclusiveness for the other software. This seems like an excellent idea to me, since colleges and universities are always struggling to adopt new software versions and may have periods when everything hasn’t been upgraded yet. Since this single book would have to get you through six different applications in a digital media course, having some extra options as to the software included in the book makes a lot of sense.

The book weighs in at over 600 pages and does not include a CD. Additional materials are provided at digitalmultimedia.org, which also features materials for another book by the same authors, Digital Multimedia. There are some very good suggestions for projects in the book, some of which require integration of more than one of the tools included to complete.

Flash MX 2004 Accelerated is the second of the Accelerated books I’ve seen from Sybex’s new series. The book does not have a single author but is by a Korean team called Youngjin. For full color guides with an included CD, the US $29.99 price on these books is quite reasonable.

Some of the books I’ve reviewed with exercises on a CD offer up less than exciting files as the book’s practice exercises. This book, however, provides skillfully made and interestingly done exercise files, a big plus for the book that seems to indicate that the book’s creators know what they are doing. Much of what is used for practice is related to some of the new features of Flash MX 2004 such as the new timeline effects. Experienced Flash users could head straight for that material and get a quick look at the new tools. I found the descriptions of the tools and techniques brief but effective. The book covers the normal Flash animation techniques such as tweening and symbol use and further includes ActionScript, Behaviors, Movie Clips, Sound and Video, and Publishing. I found the exercises about importing Illustrator files and PDF and ESP file support very interesting.

I have the same complaint about the screen shots used to illustrate certain points in this text that I had with the Dreamweaver MX 2004 Accelerated I reviewed earlier, and that is that certain points could have been better made by zooming in on a menu or icon instead of expecting users to read them as a tiny element on the whole Flash stage. This book does at least mention accessibility: there is a 28 word paragraph about the Accessibility Panel in the description of the Flash interface. When describing the new support for CSS in Flash MX 2004, the example CSS provided listed anchor selectors in this order: a:link, a:active, a:visited, a:hover. Anyone depending on this example to set up link colors and states would soon be having problems, since the correct order should be a:link, a:active, a:hover, a:visited, or L-V-H-A. Another exercise had users create a scrolling text box using a Scroll Bar Component that is no longer included in Flash MX 2004 but was supplied on the accompanying CD. Now, perhaps this was done to illustrate the fact that components could be imported from elsewhere, but if that is the case, it certainly was not explained. The text is completely Windows-centric. Mac keyboard commands and other Mac interface differences were never mentioned.

Although I have used Flash, I haven’t taught a Flash class, so I don’t have strong opinions about how it should be done properly. I would like to hear from multimedia instructors out there about whether they think this book should be a recommended teaching text.

Dreamweaver MX 2004 Accelerated is a full color guide from Sybex’s new Accelerated series. The book does not have a single author but is by a Korean team called Youngjin.

There is a lot to like in this book. There is also quite a bit not to like, and I have some unfavorable comments about what should be considered standard teaching practice.

Let’s start with the good, which does predominate the book. Each chapter contains an introductory section related to Dreamweaver MX 2004 use, and then goes on to provide exercises with accompanying files on a CD. Some of the exercises are excellent, especially the ones in the Forms, Behaviors, Templates and Multimedia chapters. The Forms chapter shows the user how to install an Apache server, MySQL and PHP and walks the user through setting up a small database and creating some forms to use it. The clip layer exercise and the pop-up labels exercise (using show-hide layers) were well done. The Behaviors chapter had several excellent exercises and is the shining star in the book’s contents. The exercises in the Multimedia chapter were also nicely done and very useful. The things that this book did well were, in fact, done better than I have seen them done in similar texts. If you are looking for teaching help in any of the areas I mentioned as excellent above, the book is worth having.

So, what’s not to like? The screen shots are too small for some of the details being shown. It would have been most helpful if the screen shots zoomed in on the relevant detail more often, instead of showing the full document window and expecting you to find a small detail on, for example, the insert bar. The book is completely Windows-centric. No mention of Mac is to be found. Most of the exercises use tables-based layouts with many using nested tables. Some Dreamweaver layers are used to position elements in a few of the exercises, but the book definitely teaches that the only way to lay out a page is with tables. The book teaches frames, which is not in itself a bad thing, but one of the exercises in the frames chapter shows the user how to add a sound file in a hidden frame with no way to turn the sound off. Additionally, the frames chapter never mentions any concerns about the accessibility of frames. The word accessibility does not appear in any chapter of this book. I guess they didn’t want to cast any shadows on their array of nested tables and hidden frames with accessibility information.

Finally, what about my issues with standard practices? You can tell from the previous paragraph that I think accessibility information should be a standard part of what is taught. But there is more. The book declares 10 points (yes, points) to be the standard Windows font size. Pixels, ems, or percentages are not explained as font size choices. CSS is right there at the beginning of the book in Chapter 3, which gladdened my heart when I read the Table of Contents. But when I read the chapter, all the user learned to do was apply a class in an inappropriate manner to some text. By inappropriate, I mean a class was created to define text in what should have been a redefinition of a <p> or <td> tag. In the Tables chapter, more CSS classes are used on a table, while simultaneously ignoring CSS for table cell backgrounds and teaching the deprecated <bgcolor> for table cells instead. The Dreamweaver MX 2004 Insert Div Tag with appropriate CSS was not explained for page layout. In my opinion the Insert Div Tag and the improved CSS panels (including the Relevant CSS panel) are the biggest improvements in Dreamweaver MX 2004 over the previous versions of Dreamweaver because they help the user move to standards-based layouts and away from tables-based layouts. This book does nothing to advance a Dreamweaver user’s knowledge about these design topics.

To sum up, there is some material here you might find extremely helpful in the classroom, but I would not recommend using this as your only text.

Color Confidence: The Digital Photographer’s Guide to Color Management by Tim Grey from Sybex cleared up a lot of questions for me. Now I feel confident about selecting a working space when bringing my digital photos into Photoshop. Now I understand a whole lot more about color profiles, Photoshop settings, and color settings for my camera, my monitor, my printer and my scanner.

Teachers of digital imaging, electronic publishing and photography classes will find this book a wonderful resource, and Web design teachers will find multiple uses for it as well.

It begins with an explanation of color itself. Then there is a detailed inspection of how to set up Photoshop with color settings, working spaces, profiles, gamut settings and other color-related information explained in most helpful depth. Even so, this isn’t a Photoshop book, despite the fact that a lot of what a photographer does with digital photos happens in Photoshop. Grey gives equal attention to selecting the best monitor and setting up a color profile for it, to selecting a scanner and setting up a color profile on it, and to how to select and configure a digital camera. He suggests utility programs and hardware that are helpful to the digital photographer throughout and give reasons why various adaptors, devices and software programs are useful to color management.

Grey explains color optimization and various output options depending on whether the image is destined for print, web, projection or e-mail. The final chapter is about workflow, and suggests workflows that will help the photographer achieve predictable output with several process specific workflows including web, e-mail and digital projection. In addition to an index, the book also contains a glossary.

Tim Grey has written other books about digital photography and teaches at the Lepp Institute of Digital Imaging.

Acrobat 6 and PDF Solutions by Taz Tally, Ph.D., was published by Sybex. The book is aimed at people who want to use documents in a variety of ways, to convert print documents to multimedia presentations or interactive forms, or to convert Web pages to PDF pages.

Author Taz Tally runs a training company, Taz Tally Seminars, that specializes in electronic publishing. Tally is known for his instructional work on Photoshop, scanning, prepress, and the DeskTop to Print series.

The book is organized in three general sections. Naturally, Part One starts with the basics related to creating proper PDF files. Details about fonts, graphics, master pages, preflighting tools, PostScript files, PostScript printers and using Distiller are covered in these chapters.

Part Two deals with PDF management tools for access, security, cropping, linking sound and movie clips to PDFs, and converting Web sites into PDF documents. This part of the book offers up helpful information about accessibility, search functions in PDF documents, e-mail functions, and eBook creation and management.

Functions available only in Acrobat Pro are covered in Part Three of the book. This information includes preflighting PDFs, editing text and graphics, outputting capabilities and printing setups, and Acrobat’s batch functions for automating certain tasks.

The book comes with a companion CD that contains starter and demonstration files for exercises included in some of the chapters of the book, plus the usual mix of demo software useful to PDF work.

I was particularly interested in the section on Converting Web Pages to PDF Documents, as I have long advocated this as a better way to comp pages to clients than with graphic representations of Web pages because the links are active and it looks and feels just like a Web page to the client. While saving a Web page as a PDF is quite simple, Tally provides a lengthy list of tips for fine-tuning the Web to PDF converstion. He provides information about issues such as creating PDF tags, scaling pages, multimedia links and references, background elements and settings, fonts and language encodings. These few pages of Web to PDF conversion information make this book worth taking a look at by Web designers and a good reference to have on hand for the Web design teacher. However, it doesn’t seem necessary to me to ask Web design students to purchase this book–simply having one copy around would be enough for the Web design teacher’s needs.

 

Building Dynamic Web Sites with Macromedia Studio MX 2004 from New Riders is by Tom Green, Jordan L. Chilcott and Chris S. Flick. It is an ambitious effort to explain a number of tools and a complex process in a single volume. Although the authors explain many basics it is not for the novice.

You need some background in the tools and skills needed for this material, or else an ability to read between the lines, to get the most out of it. That said, there is a lot here to help you use all the tools of Studio MX 2004 to plan and build a dynamic database-driven site. The book starts with very basic information such as planning the site, gathering a management, design and programming team, flowcharting the logic of the data, creating a site model and wireframing it out. Then the book walks you through building the example site (files are available from the book web site) using Dreamweaver, Cold Fusion, Fireworks, Flash, Director and non-Macromedia tools such as MySQL. Along the way you put together a site with a meeting room booking application, live chat, a database that drives dynamic content, streaming video and streaming audio. I said it was ambitious.

There is a heavy reliance on Flash: Flash Communication Server, Flash chat room design, Flash video. All the Studio MX 2004 tools are used before you finish, however.

The book was written by a team of authors. Tom Green is an educator, Jordan L. Chilcott is a programmer, and Chris S. Flick is an artist and illustrator. All are experienced web designers. They clearly consider building a site of this complexity a job for a team, not an individual.

There may be individuals who possess the diverse knowledge and skill sets needed to pull off the planning, designing, application building, database building, streaming and debugging exercises this book puts you through, but I doubt if students have this much basic knowledge already at hand. A book with a more focused approach, rather than the broad sweep taken in this book, would be more help to a student with limited background who wanted to learn how to use databases to create dynamic content.

The authors are aware of that fact, and wrote an earlier book that takes a more basic approach. It is called Building Web Sites with Macromedia Studio MX. Although I haven’t reviewed it myself, I have heard many favorable comments about it. The two books together would be a good way to take a student from newbie to polished in terms of Macromedia Studio tools. In fact, the two books together are so expansive that they might be considered an entire Webmaster certification course load, rather than a single semester’s class work.