*****= An all-time favorite
**** = Outstanding
***
= Above average
**
= Enjoyable
*
= Good,
with reservations
***Learning Web Design
A Beginner's Guide to HTML, Graphics, and Beyond
by Jennifer Niederst
Reviewed October 2, 2003.
O’Reilly, Sebastopol, CA, 2001. 388 pages.
Lately, I’ve talked with a few friends about building web sites.
Then the library got in a new book about it. That all prompted
me to finally finish reading the two books I had bought and used to get
Sonderbooks.com up and running. I’ll review all three in this issue.
Learning Web Design was the most useful of the three
books. Anyone who wants to build a web site could do the job with
this book alone. I should note that the version being sold now on
Amazon.com is the second edition. I imagine that it will be even
more helpful.
When I started building Sonderbooks, I was using an old version of
Netscape. I reasoned that if I had an old version, so might plenty
of other people, so I stayed with basic HTML. I used Netscape Composer,
which is free, to create my web site, so technically I didn’t need to
know how to write HTML. However, Composer translates pretty directly
with the HTML, so knowing the concepts of HTML, as taught in this book,
I was able to set up my web site as I wanted it.
This was the book that gave me the idea of using a simple table to
make a navigation bar on the left side of each page. I found its
examples and ideas for web design very helpful. If you wanted more
images on your web site, there were also several chapters on web graphics
that I didn’t really use.
This book has everything you need to get a simple web site up and
running.
Book Reviews
by Sondra Eklund