Web Design resources: The books
June 1st, 2008
There must be literally hundreds of web design books on sale right now but I’m pretty sure that a lot of them aren’t always as good as they’re cracked up to be!
In light of this I’ve compiled a list of books, most of which I’ve been able to use, to hopefully help people make the right choice when choosing a decent book.
The majority of these books are great for people who are new to the industry or who want to learn about the principals of standards based design incorporating better usability and accessibility along the way.
Just a note. Most books have accompanying web sites that allow you to download source code so that you can play with the examples from the books. Something that I always stupidly forget!
Web Design
- Bulletproof Web Design – Dan Cederholm
- Web Standards Solutions – Dan Cederholm
- Designing with Web Standards – Jeffery Zeldman
- Web Standards Creativity – C. Adams et al
- The Principals of Beautiful Web Design – Jason Beaird for Sitepoint
- O’Reilly CSS Pocket Reference – Eric A. Mayer for O’Reilly
- CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions – Andy Budd
- Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design – Andy Clarke
Scripting
- DOM Scripting – Jeremy Keith
- Bulletproof Ajax – Jeremy Keith
Microformats
Photoshop
- The Photoshop Anthology – Corrie Haffly for Sitepoint
Accessibility
- Web Accessibility – Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance – Various Authors
From the books above I would strongly recommend Bulletproof Web Design and Web Standards Solutions by Dan Cederholm. These are great for anyone starting out and wanting to learn about building standards based web sites that rely solely on CSS for layout. Dan Cederholm is very well known in the web design industry and runs the Simplebits web site.
Bulletproof Web Design is particularly good because it demonstraights a none-bulletproof piece of code, explains why it’s not bulletproof and then takes you through an example of how to produce a bulletproof version. You can also download the resources from the web site so that you can complete each section of the book as a tutorial, which I suppose is the whole point.
I think that the more experienced designer could benefit from CSS Mastery. A colleague of mine who has been working in the industry for around 10 years and has been into standards based web design for a good few years attended a CSS Mastery course last year and came back buzzing with ideas and techniques. This suggests to me it’s on a higher level than the other books I have mentioned.
No Web Designer or Front-end Developer should be without the O’Reilly CSS Pocket Reference because it’s just brilliant for checking rules or reminding yourself of how a certain rule works when your brain has stopped working!
Another one of the books above that seems particularly good is DOM Scripting by Jeremy Keith. His book is a great step-by-step introduction into what JavaScript is, what the DOM is and the how to progressively and unobtrusively enhance your web site using JavaScript. Jeremy Keith is, if you don’t already know, a bit of a JavaScript master and is again very well known in the industry. He runs the Adactio website.
Pretty much all of the books above have been mentioned on one well known web design site or another, or have been recomended by a friend so they should all be good reads.
If anyone knows any more good books, especially in the realms of accessibility, microformats and scripting please make a comment and I’ll add them to the lists.
July 17th, 2008 at 9:54 pm
I advice this book: “Designing with Web Standards – Jeffery Zeldman”.
July 18th, 2008 at 9:38 am
Yeah it’s a really good book – it’s on its second edition now.