Learning Web Design: A Beginner's Guide to (X)HTML, StyleSheets, and Web Graphics

Learning Web Design: A Beginner's Guide to (X)HTML, StyleSheets, and Web Graphics | Jennifer Niederst Robbins | One of the better intro to XHTML books

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Learning Web Desig...

	Learning Web Design: A Beginner's Guide to (X)HTML, StyleSheets, and Web Graphics Jennifer Niederst Robbins O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2007 - 479 pages average customer review:based on 36 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The key word is "web" not "design" - but it's a fantastic tool

This book is a fantastic introduction (or refresher course) for the nuts and bolts of web design. Information is presented with a remarkably clean, fresh and simple approach that emphasizes web standards and helps you look out for common pitfalls. For those (like me) who got their chops in the early days of the Internet, this is a great refresher course.

One thing this will NOT teach you is how to design for the web. There's virtually no real or valuable discussion of aesthetics, layout, interaction, user experience... visually speaking, you'll have to go with something else - I recommend the very excellent Principles of Beautiful Web Design by Jason Beaird - but for (X)HTML, CSS, image compression and all of the technical aspects of web design, you can't get much better than this book.

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One of the better intro to XHTML books

This is one of the better books to introduce a novice to XHTML through easy to understand lessons. I found it to far exceed the ability to present web design and graphics concepts than I found with many intro guides including Sam's. Would recommend.

A very comprehensive and enjoyable read!

"Learning Web Design", 3rd Edition, by Jennifer Niederst Robbins, is a very thoughtful book for someone starting Web Design from 'scratch'. It has been one of my main motivators for consistent learning. The book actually assigned for my class is not nearly as comprehensive. There are a handful of errors, but they are mostly minor. Only if you are paying close attention will you notice them. Overall, I am very satisfied. It's worth every penny.

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Excellent book at all levels

This is a superb book, clearly written, filled with current information, well developed, nicely laid out, printed in color so it's easy to read all the way through, or dip into a particular section. I have designed websites, taken various classes, and read several books on the topic of web design and css and this is the best by far. This should be in everyone's bookshelf.

Detailed without being geeky

Kudos to Jennifer Robbins for writing a technical book in layman's terms. Her writing, examples, exercises and outline of the book allow a person with very little (X)TML/HTML/CSS skills to understand the rudimentary mark up it takes to create a Web page. While I say rudimentary, the book goes beyond that and, I have to admit, for those who have never dived into creating Web pages, there is a learning curve. As she states somewhere, the book is like being in her classroom. The book is very much like a textbook but without being dry. And while the exercises are clearly laid out, it would oh-so nice to be able to have Jennifer go over the exercises "live". But, we are talking about a book.

I gave the book four stars instead of five for two reasons:

1) She doesn't meld (X)MTL mark up and CSS together very well. While she does an excellent job at explaining the two, she presents the mark up language in such detail that I almost became too dependent upon mark up and had a hard time bridging to CSS and making the two come together. While she makes a great distinction between the two and emphasizes how potent CSS is and how using CSS can eliminate redundancy in (X)HTML and make pages load more quickly, she never quite brings the two together to make it all click.

She says in Chapter 8, I believe, maybe it's Chapter 9, that one can skip the next few chapters and go directly to the CSS part if they so choose. Not a good idea.

2) I was astonished at the amount of typos and the errata. The errata are corrected on the publisher's Website. I didn't know about the availability of the corrections until I spent two hours following an example and an exercise and never achieved the right results, despite following the book mark up by mark up. Being extremely frustrated, I wanted to contact the publisher. I finally went to the publisher's Web page and saw the errata section. Maybe I should have known that this is typical for technical books. Did I miss something in the introduction that states there's and errata page on the Web? (The same holds true for errata for "1 Hour Web Site: 120 Professional Templates and Skins.")

But it's the amount of blatant typos that took me aback. The typos get in the way of Robbins' excellent writing. It's like listening to a great CD that has a scratch in the middle of a song.

All in all it is a very good resource. I appreciate, too, that it is in color.

One last thing: Actually do the "TEST YOURSELF" exercises. By doing them, it allows that much more of her teaching to sink in.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, page 5, 6, 7, 8

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