Drupal Multimedia is a short book, 235 pages including preface and summary chapter, but it has absolutely no fluff. There’s no rah-rah chapter explaining why Drupal is the greatest thing since buttered toast. There’s no installation chapter. There is no space wasted explaining basic CSS or HTML. The author assumes that you already have a working Apache/PHP/MySQL environment and Drupal 6 installation, can add modules, and that you know a reasonable amount of web coding and that you won’t freak out upon seeing instructions for some basic PHP tweaks. So if this sounds scary to you consider getting Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal and working through that first. It’s a more appropriate guide for the absolute beginner. But after you have the basics under your belt this is probably the best next book to get.

What the book does do is explain in cookbook style, how to add multimedia to Drupal using user contributed modules. It begins with two general purpose modules that add tremendous capabilities, the Content construction Kit (CCK) and the Views module. If you want to take Drupal beyond the basics these are important. Coverage of them is not extended but adequate, and you can see some of their more advanced capabilities through the examples given later in the book. Then the Image module is covered. I consider these three essential parts of any Drupal site and am glad that they get a good workout here.

The book then goes on to cover more specialized modules, explaining their use through examples that have legitimate real world application. A couple of the modules were written, at least in part, by Aaron Windburn and this book serves as a good user’s guide to them. Listing the modules covered probably serves little purpose out of context, so I’ll pass on that. There are also some CSS effects and some jQuery thrown in to spruce up your site.

As useful as this book is there are some small negatives. The index is only 5 pages long and only marginally worth the space. The table of contents on the publisher’s site is more useful. I caught a couple of typos. Since the multimedia capabilities are all explained in the context of specific modules, you might not find the exact match for your situation. Though the coverage of media related modules is excellent.

Still, this is a very useful book, one that would have saved me many dozens of hours searching through forums and tutorials had I had it even six months ago, and has even provide a more straightforward solution to embedded video than I’d been using. It also has me rethinking a photo gallery I spent too many hours figuring out. I’m referring to in on a current project.

Drupal Multimedia will definitely take the beginning to intermediate Drupal developer or webmaster to a new level of competence and basic sites to a new level of sophistication.

Highly recommended

Learning Web Design by Jennifer Niederest Robbins is billed as “A Beginners Guide to (X)HTML, Style Sheets and Web Graphics.” It lives up to its billing. It is structured as a text book, building a knowledge base chapter by chapter. For those working through the book as a tutorial, there are plenty of exercises that reinforce the skills you’ve acquired. Each chapter includes appropriate exercises and a “Test Yourself” section. Extra material is offered through the book’s accompanying website.

I’ve watched this book evolve through the first two editions. The first was okay, the second pretty good and finally in the third edition is something that I can fully endorse. After going through the material, there should be very little in the way of HTML and CSS coding that won’t make sense.

Contents:

• Part 1 – Getting Started: Where Do I Start?; How the Web Works; The Nature of Web Design
• Part 2 – HTML Markup for Structure: Creating a Simple Page (HTML Overview); Marking up Text; Adding Links; Adding Images; Basic Table Markup; Forms; Understanding the Standards
• Part 3 – CSS For Presentation: Cascading Style Sheets Orientation; Formatting Text (Plus More Selectors); Colors and Backgrounds (Plus Even More Selectors and External Style Sheets); Thinking Inside the Box (Padding, Borders, and Margins); Floating and Positioning; Page Layout with CSS; CSS Techniques
• Part 4 – Creating Web Graphics: Web Graphics Basics; Lean and Mean Web Graphics
• Part 5 – From Start to Finish: The Site Development Process; Getting Your Pages on the Web
• Appendix A – Answers; Appendix B – CSS 2.1 Selectors; Index

As you can see from the contents, this is a nuts and bolts text that teaches the proper coding of websites and emphasizes best practices and web standards. It mentions some software that you could use to build sites but doesn’t teach programs. It is quite up-to-date and presents very modern web building practices. Even those who have built sites in the past will find this an excellent refresher that will bring web skills into the 21st century.

As both a training text and a basic reference book Learning Web Design is an excellent resource that will give those who actually use it a solid foundation in modern web page building practices.

Ruby on Rails for Dummies assumes absolutely no prior programming experience. It doesn’t even assume any command line knowledge. It does assume a decent grounding in HTML and CSS, but that’s true of any web based programming book. Going directly from a visual web layout tool to RoR will be too big a leap. It would be like trying to complete a 10 K run after practicing by jogging a mile three times a week for a month or so. You might get through it but the process would be more than a bit painful. But if you have your hand coding chops but no real programming background you should find this book a fine and gentle introduction to Ruby on Rails.

It made a number of ideas clear that the Agile book assumed I was already familiar with. It provides a nice quick start to RadRails, a fee RoR development environment, which somewhat insulates you from the straight command line approach taken my more advanced RoR texts and provides a pre-packaged Ruby on Rails development environment. There is also a short introduction to the Ruby programming language. It’s very basic but probably helpful

.

Ruby on Rails for Dummies proceeds step-by-step through a couple of very simple RoR applications. It’s enough to get your feet wet and make more advanced books approachable. It does not provide enough of a knowledge base to actually go out and start developing web applications. You’ll still need to get a more advanced book but at least you will have a decent foundation on which to build.

The book uses Windows examples. Don’t worry, RadRails is a Java application and fully cross platform. Rails should run on OS X version 3 or later. There are thorough Rails OS X installation instructions at the HIVELOGIC Narrative and a sample chapter of the book (PDF) from the book’s website.

$29.99 list – $19.79 at Amazon.

I picked this book up at the WebVisions conference after attending a session of the same name that Dan Cederholm gave. My original intent was just to see Cederholm in action. He is one of the current “rock stars” of web design, at least among the web standards crowd.

When I was listening to his talk I was thinking that this is so obvious, maybe I was wasting my time. It was only later that I realized that it was only obvious because Dan is such a good presenter and made his concepts logical and easy to understand.

What is “Bulletproof Web Design”? Mostly it is a set of best practices that help make sites work under less than ideal conditions. Consider, what happens if your site visitor has images or JavaScript turned off? Perhaps the visitor has an older computer running an old browser. What happens if your style sheet fails to load?

Here’s a quick experiment. Right now push the command (Apple) and + keys. The text all got bigger, right? Hit the command and – keys and it gets smaller. This page looks alright if you only increase or decrease the size once, but if you up the size twice, the top navigation bar starts to look a little bad. Do it three or more times and gets pretty awful. Even though my template validates as XHTML Strict, and most of my content is structured symantically, it is not totally bulletproof. I failed to account for the effects of text resizing when I designed the nav bar. A bulletproof design would have considered this possibility and designed the page so it would still look okay even when not view the way I designed it.

As my middle-aged eyes now require me to use reading glasses for normal sized text, I will often increase the font size on a page instead of reach for the glasses. I’m not alone in that. And that’s just one example of how a page could be designed to cover contingencies.

I took the first few steps toward bulletproofing the design. The code validates. Content and design are separate, The site works with CSS and images turned off, but I failed to take the next step from standard best practices to bulletproofing. I placed an unresizable background behind resizable text.

So, a bulletproof site is one that is well coded, structured and takes into account a reasonable range of non-standard viewing possibilities. It has some breathing room and considers possible “what happens if?” scenarios. In my case I could have designed the page with a larger background image behind the nav bar that would have given the appearance of stretching to contain the text of the links.

Other cases consider what happens if the content changes, text or images? What happens if images and/or Flash, JavaScript are turned off. Is the site still usable and if it’s usable, does it still look good? How does the page look in a new, very wide screen? How does it look on an old small screen, or even a cell phone?

Creating bulletproof sites requires both thought and knowledge HTML and CSS, so is not going to make much impact on the pure “design it so it looks good and to hell with the visitor if she doesn’t like my way crowd”. And those who don’t want to take the time to learn the craft won’t even know that bulletproof design is possible or why it is needed.

The book is excellent, well written, clear and lays out the concepts in a step-by-step manner that makes the concepts easy to grasp. If you have a decent understanding of HTML and CSS and want to take your designs to the next level, get a copy. To quote John Alsop of The Dao of Webdesign:

“The journey begins by letting go of control and becoming flexible”

_Bulletproof Web Design_ will make you a more flexible web designer.

When I got the review copy I was surprised at the size of the book. As this is a beginner’s text I expected it to be smaller. That’s not a complaint, just an observation. This is a meaty volume that covers how to write the code in web pages quite thoroughly.

By Elisabeth Freeman, Eric Freeman
First Edition December 2005
Pages: 694
Price: $34.95

With all the buzz about the Head First series in the web design world I was interested to see if this series really offers something new. The short answer is yes. The authors have attempted to make learning HTML and CSS easy and fun. That’s a big order, though they have succeeded as well as anybody and better than most.

Instead of pages and pages of dry text, Headfirst HTML interjects lots of images and learning games. There are exercises in matching, even crossword puzzles to keep the material from getting too dry. No prior knowledge is expected and all terms are well defined.

Some people have complained about the repetition found in the book. It is certainly there. The authors even mention this in the forward. For the most part it is well done. Learning requires repetition and learning requires repetition too. Having taught web design to adults, this has become very obvious to me. Fortunately the authors do a better job of repeating themselves in different and interesting ways than I am able to.

Will this book work for everybody? No. It does make good use of modern learning theory to break the material into digestible chunks that are offered in a logical and sequential manner. I’m very impressed. But as with any training sequence it needs to be followed and worked.

If you like to try things out yourself then check a reference book to get you past your stuck points you would be better served by something like the “HTML for the World Wide Web: Visual Quickstart Guide” or “Web Design in a Nutshell”. If you are good at following training programs in order and take the time to work through this book you will know more HTML than most web designers. And your knowledge will be current and standards compliant.

This is an excellent training manual but a poor reference book. So, if you are looking for solid, well designed sequential training course, I highly recommend this. If you won’t take the time to work the book, look elsewhere.

Remember that old conversational gambit when you were asked what you would want or who you would want to be with on a desert isle? If I had to design web pages and had only one reference on that island this would be it.

As with all of O’Reilly Publishing’s Nutshell series books, this one is dense with information. Unlike others in the series it is thick, at over 800 pages. It’s not something you’ll curl up with and enjoy — unless you are way more of a geek than I. This is a look-up-what-you-need reference book. Period.

I probably wouldn’t recommend this book to learn web design. But if you have a basic knowledge of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc., you won’t find a more thorough web design encyclopedia.

And it is current as well as thorough. The Second Edition came out in 2001 and was in danger of becoming seriously out of date. The Third Edition has been extensively rewritten and covers the nitty-gritty of the new web landscape with focus on DOM scripting, CSS layout, and XHTML. Web Design in a Nutshell also covers the nut-and-bolts of multimedia production as well as more traditional web graphics.

New to this edition is an expanded coverage of accessibility issues, display devices and internationalization.

The writing style is terse but clear. Niederst Robbins is an old hand at writing web design books and doesn’t try to impress us with her knowledge or bore us with unnecessary attempts at humor.

Highly Recommended

Zeldman is a man on a mission. His mission is Web Standards. As a guiding light in the Web Standards Project, he has long been figure of note in the web design world.

What are web standards? For a detailed answer, read the book. The short answer is they are a set of best practices codified by the World Wide Web Consortium that, if they were followed, would make all web designer’s lives easier.

The book is equal parts how to and why to. So if you are looking for a “just how to do it” book, you will be disappointed. If you care about web design and you are not up on web standards you should read it anyway. Your web sites will be better for it. Even if you are knowledgeable about web standards it is a good refresher.

After just a couple of years Designing with Web Standards is already a classic. In part that is because Zeldman is a good writer with just enough sardonic wit to keep his text from becoming pedantic. In part it is because Zeldman is a high profile figure in the web standards world. In part it is because this is a pretty fast read for a technical book. And, in part it it because there is a lot of good information contained between the covers.

Designing with Web Standards
by Jeffery Zeldman
List: $35

Recommended