Review of Ambient Findability by Peter Morville

This book is a wide-ranging rumination on many different topics, all basically related to the internet and findability: from maps to libraries to tagging to gps to artificial intelligence. I have to say, I love the term ‘findability,’ it’s a great word that exactly describes what I try to build into a web site.

I enjoyed the chapter on wayfinding the most. It’s always good to have your point of view stretched, and thinking of a website as a place that people find their way through, is a good stretch. After the wayfinding chapter, the text became more theoretical and obtuse, so don’t expect a quick, easy read.

This book won’t really teach you how to make your website more findable, but it does talk about why the internet isn’t completely categorized and tagged and how people can make their way through the loads and loads of information out there.

I know that some people are overwhelmed by the information available. I’ve never felt that way (part of the reason I make my living on the internet) but this book pointed out how people get lost and how they try and find their way and how we can help them find their ways better.

You can check out Ambient Findability (and other web design books) in the Cornercode Amazon Store.

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If you only read one book about web design, read this one. You can find out how to code HTML, CSS and any other acronym you can think of online. You can find tutorials on Dreamweaver. You can look at different sites to see how they did things, but you won’t find the information and know-how distilled down into this small book.

This book is about Web Usability and I return to it over and over, re-reading sections to re-fresh my memory and to figure out how to explain web usability to my clients.

You can check out Don’t Make Me Think (and other web design books) in the Cornercode Amazon Store.

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Another CSS/Web Design book from Friends of Ed. After reading and loving Web Standards Solutions (see my review), I was really looking forward to this book.

Unfortunately, I was mostly disappointed. Not that this isn’t a good CSS book, but it’s 2 years after Web Standards Solutions was published and it’s covering basically the same ground: lists, backgrounds, and forms. The new information wasn’t that interesting to me:

Image Replacement

I’ve read a lot about image replacement, i.e. ways to replace text like an h1 at the top of a page with a graphic of the company’s logo. I’m just not convinced that the benefit (searchable text at the top of the page, more accessible than using an alt tag) outweighs the hassle (lots of different hacks to make sure it works without css, without javascript, in the readers for the blind, etc).

Hacks and Filters

I don’t like to hack my CSS. I’d much rather add either an extra div or an extra css rule or two and make it work in all browsers. That way I don’t have any surprises with the newer browsers.

Bugs and Bug Fixing

Every bug list seems to be missing the bug that I’m currently wrestling with. Same thing here.

Plus Side: Case Studies

The case studies were interesting for seeing how a particular web designer approaches a project, but felt kind of tacked on.

In the end, this wasn’t the book for me. I didn’t need the information on the advanced techniques and I already knew the intermediate techniques.

You can check out CSS Mastery (and other web design books) in the Cornercode Amazon Store.

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A companion to Cederholm’s other book, Bullet Proof Web Design, Web Standards Solutions is a concise, easy to read introduction to using web standard coding on your web pages. I love this book and return to it all the time. As the title suggests, Cederholm doesn’t just talk about web standards, he offers solutions to common web page problems or situations.

The chapter on forms was particularly enlightening for me, I’d never heard of the label element, which can help create a nice looking, accessible and standards compliant form (without using tables). I also liked the chapter on Anchors (something I need to review again). Seems like a lot of the other books skip over these unglamorous, simple tags (like ul and a) but that’s what simple, semantic web pages are all about (at least on the code level).

One minor quibble, I couldn’t see any place to download the code, but most of it is so simple, that it’s not hard to type in by hand.

You can check out Web Standards Solutions (and other web design books) in the Cornercode Amazon Store.

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A book in the new ‘Head FIrst’ series from O’Reilly. The point of the series is that it’s designed to be easy to learn from by using diagrams, conversations (interviews with CSS elements) and games (crosswords). They did some research into how most people learn and then used that research when making the book.

It’s a great beginner’s web design book. Not only does it teach you HTML and CSS, but it teaches how to use them to make good web pages. There’s discussion of web standards, of accessibility, and of best coding practices. It’s very thorough, I learned a few tidbits (like applying a line height to a div will apply that line height to all the elements in the div).

I’d definitely recommend it to someone just starting out who wants an overview of how to code HTML and CSS. As to whether the ‘Head First’ philosophy works, well, I’m all for anything that makes it easier to learn this stuff. I happen to be one of the strange ones who can read most manuals and learn it, but I do appreciate the well-written ones, and this is one of those.

You can check out Head First HTML (and other web design books) in the Cornercode Amazon Store.

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I’m a big fan of the missing manual series, but since I own several pounds worth of Dreamweaver manuals and have been using the program for a few years, I wasn’t going to get this one. Then I decided I needed to do more with templates, and this looked like the best resource.

Like the other Missing Manuals I’ve read, Dreamweaver 8 TMM is easy to read and comprehensive. It really is the book that should have been in the box. It includes several lengthy tutorials and explains why you should make web pages the way they teach you, so you’re learning about web design and the program. It doesn’t get into the nitty gritty of HTML or CSS coding, but does touch on both. To really use Dreamweaver well, I think you should know how to wrangle the code, but it’s possible to do a lot without looking under the hood.

If you’re looking for the end-all, be-all manual for Dreamweaver 8, this is what I’d recommend. I go back to it, from time to time, when I’m getting into Dreamweaver’s more esoteric features.

Missing Manual Web Site: missingmanual.com

You can check out Dreamweaver 8: The Missing Manual (and other web design books) in the Cornercode Amazon Store.

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Wonderful book on creating web sites that will scale and not break. The web is a constantly changing medium: new browsers, new protocols, new requirements. When we were making pixel-perfect layouts using graphics any change pretty much broke the page. Now, using semantic HTML and CSS, we can make sites that flex and don’t break and this book shows you how.

This isn’t a book for a beginner, you’d better know your p’s from your div’s, but it’s definitely worth reading. I’m not sure I’ll use all the coding methods covered, but it made me change how I think about my designs and I’m using some of the code in my pages. And by going through this coding, I learned a lot more about how CSS works and why it does some of the strange things it does (like how to use floats to make a div enclose all of it’s contents).

This is one of the best of the next-gen CSS books. Books that don’t list all the CSS rules and explain what each does, but books that show you how to use CSS and HTML together.

You can check out Bulletproof Web Design (and other web design books) in the Cornercode Amazon Store.

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