Amazon.co.uk
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
Amazon.com
Are you a print designer working on the Web? An HTML coder learning about server-side hosting for the first time?
Web Design in a Nutshell has slim but whole chapters for those topics-- and everything else you can imagine.
Written in the popular "Nutshell" format, this guide is full of helpful tables and lists, making it a perfect desktop reference. The book breaks down the huge topic of Web site development into understandable, readable segments: the Web environment (browsers, displays, design principles), an in-depth guide to HTML tags, graphics manipulation and display, multimedia possibilities, and technologies for larger site management (such as Cascading Style Sheets [CSS] and XML).
While this book is certainly comprehensive, the abundance of information could be overwhelming to someone just starting out with HTML. In addition, the heart of this book is filled with technical specificity on Web page creation (for example, a section under "Graphics" is titled "GIF87a versus GIF89a"). Readers looking for more conceptual explanations of Web design and layout would be better served with other titles. But for day-to-day development and maintenance, Web Design in a Nutshell is a truly well-constructed toolkit.
