* Two highly recommended Web apps books
This is a first for this newsletter: Book reviews. The reason for this is that I have received a couple of outstanding books on a complex topic that I think every content developer should have copies of.
The first book is “The Zen of CSS design” by Dave Shea and Molly E. Holzschlag (New Riders, 2005). In this newsletter back in 2003, I discussed a wonderful Web site called the CSS Zen Garden (see editorial links below), which demonstrates how powerful and subtle Cascading Style Sheets can be. As the site notes: “A demonstration of what can be accomplished visually through CSS-based design.”
On the site you can select from a list of style sheets designed by many people and load it into the demo page and see what happens. Even better, you can download the page contents and any style sheet so you can really understand what is going on (and some of the style sheets are really clever so the learning opportunity is profound).
Anyway, the person behind the CSS Zen Garden is Dave Shea and the book he co-authored explains the background to the site and then takes some of the best style sheets from the site and deconstructs them explaining in detail the how and why involved.
The book is subtitled “Visual enlightenment for the Web” and that is certainly what it delivers. Unlike most books on CSS, Shea and Holzschlag’s book captures the creativity and technique that can produce some of the most compelling and often surprising effects and behaviors that I have seen achieved with CSS.
This is absolutely a “must have” book for anyone working with cascading style sheets.
Our second book is “Web ReDesign 2.0: Workflow That Works” by Kelly Goto and Emily Cotter (New Riders, 2005). As you might expect from the title, this book focuses on the process of redesigning Web content. When you have a Web site with any serious history behind it and you’re looking to revitalize your look and feel or simply consolidate what you’ve got, the task in front of you is usually at the daunting level if not the downright scary level.
This book provides a framework and the tools to approach the challenge in an organized and effective manner. In particular the workflow orientation is a key tool for achieving a cost-effective result rather than what often happens (a result that few site owners would ever want to talk about … or for that matter, think about).
The book isn’t just for the Web wonks out there – it also presents its various topics at an executive level so as either an in-house or external Web developer you may find it a great tool for educating your management or client.
As the authors note the book isn’t a design guide or a usability testing reference – it is about the process and management of redesign and any other part of the procedure is subsidiary to a plan for getting the job done.
For experienced Web designers there will be some parts of the book that you know well but few will be able to say that they haven’t learned something new when they finish it. Highly recommended.
