I bought this book for one reason: there is a double-page spread concerning Pepsi.com (pages 32-33). It made me laugh, because I was the webmaster for Pepsi.com when this book came out. They were viewing the site out of the context of the frame it was supposed to be in (they purposely launched a new browser window from within the fixed-sized frame and maximized the window to show a tiling background), which was misleading and a bit inflamatory to those of us who slave over a site that at the time was around 650MB per issue and changed top to bottom every single month.
The screenshot they got of the site was also of a help screen that was up for about 1 week and then altered. The entire site is done in Flash, now, and a lot of the cross-browser, cross-platform issues that were such a barrier in the past are now a moot point.
They point out some valid points about contrast, abuse of animation, but this is a book best suited for beginning designers, not seasoned pros.
They haven't come out with a newer volume and despite the description of this book (I am submitting a revision today) as being a 1998 book, the copyright of the book I have (same ISBN number) is 1996. That's 28 in dog years and a millenium in web years. While good design is still good design, despite the year, even casual surfers who've been surfing for a few months will find some of this info old-hat.
I must admit that it's a little unfair to criticize a technical book 4 years after it hit the shelves, but my main criticisms are the same as when I first purchased the book a few years ago. Even then, there were many free on-line tutorials that covered the same topic of basic design and definite design faux pas.
I do keep this on my shelf in my office, the book is a nicely presented volume and clients find it quite amusing... but other than that... eck.
