Web Design in a Nutshell, Third Edition
A Desktop Quick Reference
By Jennifer Niederst Robbins
Third Edition
ISBN: 0-596-00987-9
826 pages, $34.99 US, $48.99 CA, £24.99 UK

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 The Second Edition came out in 2001 and was in danger of becoming seriously out of date.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

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