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 Book Review

by Dale Farris, President, Golden Triangle PC Club
May 2001

This new O'Reilly book on web design, from the same author of the super "Web Design in a Nutshell," (November 1998 - also from O'Reilly), is an excellent beginner's guide to using HTML coding, graphics, and other techniques in designing web pages. Author Jennifer Niederst's work is one of four titles now in O'Reilly's rapidly growing lineup of works on web design, their Web Studio Series.

Other titles in the O'Reilly Web Studio Series include "Web Navigation" (September 1998 - by Jennifer Fleming), "Designing Web Audio" (January 2001 - by Josh Beggs & Dylan Thede), and "Designing with JavaScript, 2nd Edition" (June 2001 - by Nick Heinle).

Ms. Niederst's earlier work on HTML coding, "Web Design in a Nutshell," is a more comprehensive work on learning HTML coding and contains detailed explanations, making it more appropriate for intermediate-level and professional web designers. "Learning Web Design" is Ms. Niederst's marvelous new HTML book that targets the concerns of those just beginning to learn how to create web pages. As she says in her preface to the book, "I like to think of it ("Learning Web Design") as the "prequel" to the Nutshell book." With the two of these books in hand, you have the makings of a solid foundation that will help you get going in your efforts to learn how to create web pages.

Although focusing on beginners, "Learning Web Design" does assume a reader knows their way around a computer and has a basic familiarity with the Internet. Ms. Niederst does not teach basic principles of graphic design, such as color theory, type design, or balance and proportion. However, she does cover some design tips in chapter 19 on Web Design Do's and Don'ts. She also assumes the reader knows how to use an image editing program to create graphics, while she teaches how to make these graphics files appropriate for the Web.

With her many years of experience with HTML, and her extensive teaching experience with all levels of students, this new entry by Ms. Niederst in the expanding genre of titles on how to create web pages has more credibility and reliability than many. The author's extensive experience with Web designers from the high-end, highly professional level, to first-time beginners looking to just get a start in Web design, has enabled her to develop a successful method for teaching that forms the basic structure for this book. She has organized the material such that reading this book is a lot like sitting in her classroom.

Her "Web Design in a Nutshell" title was written to help in her job as a Web designer, and it will well serve others as equally experienced as she is in this realm, while her "Learning Web Design" will be more suited to beginners. This means this work can be used in a classroom environment, since her focus is to begin at the beginning. For universities and colleges presenting HTML classes, or a sequence of courses covering various Web design aspects of the Internet, this title could be of much value in an Introduction to HTML class.

Throughout the book, the author provides extensive pointers on how current web design tools, both for authoring web pages and creating web graphics, can help a designer to more quickly and easily create web sites. Since she obviously cannot include every available web-related program now on the market, she has decided to stick with the more popular tools. These include Dreamweaver, GoLive and FrontPage for web authoring, and Photoshop, Fireworks, and Paint Shop Pro for web graphics. In most instances, the general principles apply to whichever tool is preferred, and as many readers also know, the shelves abound with titles on how to use these proprietary tools.

Content Features

Emphasis on learning HTML, character by character, the "right way"
Basic concepts and core syntax of HTML
Introduction to programming HTML
Creating links within and between documents
Basics of cascading style sheets
Extensive use of sample screen shots of various HTML editors
Extensive diagrams and figures to help demonstrate how the coding works

Table of Contents

The twenty (20) chapters include the following.
  1. Where Do I Start?
  2. How the Web Works
  3. Getting Your Pages on the Web
  4. Why Web Design Isn't Like Print Design
  5. The Web Design Process
  6. Creating a Simple Page (HTML Overview)
  7. Formatting Text
  8. Adding Graphics Elements
  9. Adding Links
  10. Tables
  11. Frames
  12. Color on the Web
  13. All About Web Graphics
  14. Creating GIFs
  15. Creating JPEGs
  16. Animated GIFs
  17. Web Design Techniques
  18. Building Usable Web Sites
  19. Web Design Dos and Don'ts
  20. How'd They Do That?: An Introduction to Advanced Techniques

About the Author

Jennifer Niederst was one of the first designers for the Web. As the designer of O'Reilly's Global Network Navigator (GNN), the first commercial web site, she has been designing for the Web since 1993. Since then, she has been working almost exclusively on the Web, first as creative director of Songline Studios (a subsidiary of O'Reilly), where she designed the original interface for WebReview (www.webreview.com), and as a freelance designer and consultant since 1996. She is the author of the best-selling "Web Design in a Nutshell" (O'Reilly, 1999), and has taught web design at the Massachusetts College of Art and the Interactive Factory in Boston, MA. She has spoken at major design and Internet events including the GRAFILL conference (Geilo, Norway), Seybold Seminars, and the W3C International Expo. In addition to designing, Jennifer enjoys cooking, travel, indie-rock, and making stuff. You can visit her at www.littlechair.com or send her email at jen@oreilly.com.

Target Readers

Readers of this excellent introduction to HTML will more likely be those already involved in creating content for their Web sites and customers. This book presumes that folks working with HTML also are capable of handling the many times tedious work of setting up the hard coding that makes HTML pages so easy to use for so many viewers. I also suggest that colleges and universities supporting classes in Web authoring consider this excellent work to aid in their expansion of learning for students eager to dive into HTML.

This title will definitely suit the needs of anyone desiring to learn HTML coding on their own. While the book can serve the needs of most formal classrooms, most "textbooks" in HTML usually also contain a lot of sample exercises, end-of-chapter tests, classroom assignments, homework exercises, or other such official classroom material. While this is not the intent of this book, Ms. Niederst has produced an excellent beginner's guide to learning HTML that will be very relevant and appropriate for the classic retail market.

However, HTML class instructors will definitely want to add this title to their office library, as the author's expert skills and advice are superbly summarized and organized here, making this a super HTML reference that will nicely supplement the textbook approach. While I think this book could be used as an assigned text for formal HTML classes, I suspect most HTML instructors will likely want to consider it more as a valuable additional asset. 

O'Reilly Hits Another Homer

The O'Reilly publishing firm, famous for their emphasis on a common-sense approach to explaining very technical material, depth of detail, and focus on the practical, has released an invaluable tool for anyone interested in learning how to create Web pages. With Ms. Niederst's principle-driven approach, namely that students NEED to know how to set up HTML coding, character by character, the so-called "hard way," students that follow her steps will be better prepared to apply these fundamental techniques when they eventually do begin to use the advanced features in today's modern HTML editors.

While this approach is of course much more tedious and time consuming, nevertheless, unless you understand how to use the keyboard to enter the HTML characters one by one to create the HTML code, you will not fully appreciate what can be done with today's newer HTML editing programs. Also, this fundamental approach helps students better appreciate the tremendous amount of hard work and extensive time it really does take to create today's interactive web pages. While the superficial pointing and clicking that defines the viewer interface of well designed web pages may make creating these sites seem so easy, this ease of viewer access is the clue that the work behind the scenes is far more difficult than most viewers usually can imagine.

This release from O'Reilly and Ms. Niederst's other O'Reilly title, "Web Design in a Nutshell," can easily be considered two essential works anyone seriously interested in learning how to create Web pages ought to have in their library.

Book Contents

410 pages; preface; acknowledgments; figures; tips; tool tips for various HTML editors; color screen shots; diagrams; glossary; index; cover colophon

Author

Jennifer Niederst

ISBN

March 2001, First Edition
0-596-00036-7

List Price

$34.95

Publisher

Contact: Lisa Mann
lisam@oreilly.com
1-707-829-0515, ext 230
O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
101 Morris Street
Sebastopol, California 95472
1-800-998-9938
1-707-829-0515
FAX 1-707-829-0104
www.oreilly.com