Amazon.co.uk Review
Web Design in a Nutshell is the welcome second edition of a classic Web authoring guide. It is aimed at professionals, with the focus sharply on page layout rather than scripting or programming. Two things are outstanding. First, the book is a handy reference for core Web standards like HTML tags, character entities, MIME types and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Second, and most important, the author offers concise, meticulous explanations and comments on key topics including the various different approaches to text formatting, choosing and optimising image types, and getting good results from tables. She highlights the importance of Web standards, and is careful to include Macintosh as well as Windows issues when discussing design tools or compatibility matters. Reference information is up-to-date as of Internet Explorer 5.5 and Netscape 6.0.
The early chapters offer general introduction to the Web environment, laying down basic design principles and covering tricky issues like printing and internationalisation. The next part covers formatting and layout with HTML, hyperlinks, tables, frames, forms and CSS. Part three is an in-depth look at images, particularly JPEG, GIG, PNG, and colour usage. Multimedia comes next, featuring video and audio formats as well as Flash movies, while the final part introduces other technologies such as Javascript and Dynamic HTML, XML, XHTML and WAP. These overviews are useful, but the best chapters are those that cover the nitty-gritty of setting out a page. It is ideal for print designers who need to understand Web design, or as a reliable general-purpose handbook for Web authors. --Tim Anderson
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Amazon.co.uk Review
Web design can be very simple these days thanks to the massive selection of programs available to take the difficulty out of producing slick Web sites.
But for the perfectionists and those who want more than a passing degree of control over their creations, the only real way to produce Web content is the old fashioned way--with a copy of a decent text editor and a head full of HTML tags.
There's no denying that this method ultimately produces the best results and the gives greater control over layouts but it's all so difficult. Isn't it?
O'Reilly's Web Design in a Nutshell aims to prove that it needn't be.
This superb book gives a no-nonsense overview of HTML programming starting from the ground up and encapsulating some of the more advanced topics some lesser books choose not to approach.
Everything is so well presented it makes for easy reading even when not sitting at your computer. It's nice to see such good support for multiple browsers too--the book gives information about which commands will work with which browser so it's easy to produce more universally accessible sites.
Although this is not aimed squarely at the beginner it's so well written it should be on any prespective coder's bookshelf from an early stage. An excellent read --Andrew Russell
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
by Dr. Nigel Chapman
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