Learning Web Design: A Beginner’s Guide to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Web Graphics

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3 responses to “Learning Web Design: A Beginner’s Guide to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Web Graphics”

1. 

   Ann Foley

   January 13, 2014

   53 of 54 people found the following review helpful

   
   Great Textbook & Reference, October 19, 2012

   By 

   Ann Foley (Prairie du Sac, WI) –
   
     

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   This review is from: Learning Web Design: A Beginner’s Guide to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Web Graphics (Paperback)

   Oh, I love this book. If you’re shopping for a beginning web design book, get this one first. You’ll end up using it until it’s dog-eared, and waiting eagerly for a new edition in a few years!

   I teach introductory Web Page Design to design students at Madison College in Madison, WI. This is the textbook I require my students to buy.

   Learning Web Design has a friendly style and great explanations of what web pages are, how they work and how to make them. It drills deeply into HTML, CSS and web images. And it touches on javascript and other topics you’ll need to know if you continue to work in web design/development.

   More important to me and my very visual students, the book is well designed (a rarity in books about web design/development). The page layout and images used make the book’s information easier to understand and make the book fun to sit down and read.

   Learning Web Design is a great tool for my students, and I’m sure it serves them as a great reference as they enter their careers.

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2. 

   Boanerges Aleman-Meza “aleman”

   January 13, 2014

   35 of 37 people found the following review helpful

   
   It tells you not only how to do stuff, it tells you why and when it is right to do so, October 9, 2012

   By 

   Boanerges Aleman-Meza “aleman” (Houston, TX, USA) –

   This review is from: Learning Web Design: A Beginner’s Guide to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Web Graphics (Paperback)

   The book tells you not only how to do stuff, it tells you why and when it is right to do so. Proportionally speaking, if the book were 11 pages, you get 1 page for introduction, 3 for HTML, 5 for CSS and 2 for javascript. The book focuses on the important stuff, and says what is good on each. You can always learn the material online via web search, copying examples, etc, but it will take a while to grasp the ‘why’ of its intended usage.

   If you already know some of the material and want a refresher on the latest (such as HTML5), simply go to the ‘test yourself’ section at the end of each chapter. The core of the book is the HTML and CSS content. It nicely explains what it’s new in HTML5.

   HTML5: the book tells you what to do for browsers that do not support HTML5. It is to the point in just what you need to know. It includes enough for the video tag but not too much. If you need to go deep into canvas tag, get another book.

   CSS: the book gives you strategies for page layout, and covers nice stuff such as round corners, transitions, transformations, animations. Finally I was able to fully understand a number of CSS techniques that I have used in my sites.

   JavaScript: the book covers enough to practically know what it is and why you may have to learn it in the future. If you need to go deep in JavaScript, get another book. Lastly, a small chapter on web graphics is what I consider ‘filler’ content for people that know nothing about image formats.

   The book is big and pretty, in the same way that you can learn genetics online, we all know that the best is to get a genetics book and read through it. Similarly here, you wont regret getting the hard-copy, it is similar to a traditional college book (definitely less pricey than a genetics book). The reader can be a newbie or skilled person in web page design. Newbie will learn in a ‘clean’ way, the skilled person will refresh/learn how to correctly use HTML5 tags and CSS.

   Disclaimer: I was provided with a copy of the book from O’Reilly for review.

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3. 

   Orozco Lopez Victor Leonel “tuxtor”

   January 13, 2014

   28 of 32 people found the following review helpful

   
   Good foundation book, September 20, 2012

   By 

   Orozco Lopez Victor Leonel “tuxtor” (Guatemala) –
   
     

   This review is from: Learning Web Design: A Beginner’s Guide to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Web Graphics (Paperback)

   I received this book as a part of O’Reilly User Groups program, although I’m interesed in many other topics, I was searching for a book that could help to eliminate the “ugly GUI” culture that I’ve noticed in my own developments and development for others, specially when the technology is Java.

   In my developer phase I’ve noticed that the average developer becomes astonished by the Java GUI framework of the season and jumps from University to the work field with a little knowledge about HTML, CSS and JavaScript repeating always the sentence “let the designers design, I’m here for the hard work”. In real world soon or later is necessary to match both roles or act as powerfull developer-designer, however most of times the lack of good HTML/CSS/JS knowledge is avoided using WYSIWIG editors or dragging JSF components from the IDE designer. At the end is functional but most of times, the lost of control over HTML generation also means ugly or non standard compliant GUI.

   About the book:
   As many experienced web developers already know, the real issue with HTML learning is not find the material. By the contrary the real problem is choose between the available free learning tutorials without being overwhelmed because of the repeated material. W3Schools is a good and reference start point, but I’ve seen every HTML tutorial claiming itself as the best, that I just avoid them because of they cause the contrary effect in me.

   However at this book I found many topics that I was looking for, Jennifer Niedrst presents a nice book without using pretentious words exploring from zero the HTML/CSS/JS world in a general way without ignoring imporant details, but avoiding more advanced topics like jQuery, blueprints, or whatever tool that could represent more problems if you don’t have enough knowledge.

   The book is divided in five big sections:

   Foundation
   HTML
   CSS
   JavaScript
   Recommended file formats for web

   Personal view:

   In mi opinion the book is great to get a general and updated web view, including elements from HTML 4 and HTML 5 in a logic and sorted way, highlighting many characteristics available at the moment and describing which of them are compatible (or not) with modern web browsers (HTML 5 is an on-going work). The book also explains some history and how the transition to HTML 5 started, covering many of the new semantic tags at HTML 5 that I must confess is the first time that I hear about them, is good to update your knowledge 😀 .

   For many intermediate developers, some sections could be boring, specially the first half of the first section because it talks about very basic things like “What is a web browser?” or “What is a FTP server?”, and also the last part because talks about many formats that are recommended for web distribution (again because I know most of them) but this are more conditional issues and is fundamental information for people interested in learning web pages creation. By the way in general the book is well written and I found the best DOM definition that I’ve seen (simple and concise). The exercises are simple but perfect to learn how to write web pages in a semantically fashion in order to get easy indexation and good content rendering. Also I noticed that the books talks about the bad support of standards in Internet Explorer 8, but in a professional way and without praising other web browsers.

   Highlights:

   A perfect book for HTML/CSS/JS introduction and learning.
   Also is a good reference book because it’s well structured, is easy to search by topic and jump to related topics.
   The exercises are easy and you only need a good text editor.
   The book contains many warnings about new things in HTML and the book clarifies which web browser support or not support new characteristics, and most importantly what will happen with older browsers when they receive unsupported HTML 5 tags.

   Things that may upset:

   If the reader is looking a guide to update his knowledge, the first impression could be very bad, but as the book progresses it becomes interesting.
   The book is designed for PC screens, paper or tablets. The graphics are not well displayed on e-readers (I’ve tested it on a nook touch) and many references are based on the color of the text with sentences like “see the text highlighted in red” . . . but the e-reader displays only B&W.
   It has many suggestions in order to create good user experience , BUT is not a good book to learn how to design user experience if you are looking for that.

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