Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #88132 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 640 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Web Design in a Nutshell is the welcome second edition of a classic Web authoring guide. It is aimed at professionals, with the focus sharply on page layout rather than scripting or programming. Two things are outstanding. First, the book is a handy reference for core Web standards like HTML tags, character entities, MIME types and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Second, and most important, the author offers concise, meticulous explanations and comments on key topics including the various different approaches to text formatting, choosing and optimising image types, and getting good results from tables. She highlights the importance of Web standards, and is careful to include Macintosh as well as Windows issues when discussing design tools or compatibility matters. Reference information is up-to-date as of Internet Explorer 5.5 and Netscape 6.0.

The early chapters offer general introduction to the Web environment, laying down basic design principles and covering tricky issues like printing and internationalisation. The next part covers formatting and layout with HTML, hyperlinks, tables, frames, forms and CSS. Part three is an in-depth look at images, particularly JPEG, GIG, PNG, and colour usage. Multimedia comes next, featuring video and audio formats as well as Flash movies, while the final part introduces other technologies such as Javascript and Dynamic HTML, XML, XHTML and WAP. These overviews are useful, but the best chapters are those that cover the nitty-gritty of setting out a page. It is ideal for print designers who need to understand Web design, or as a reliable general-purpose handbook for Web authors. --Tim Anderson

Amazon.co.uk Review
Web design can be very simple these days thanks to the massive selection of programs available to take the difficulty out of producing slick Web sites.

But for the perfectionists and those who want more than a passing degree of control over their creations, the only real way to produce Web content is the old fashioned way--with a copy of a decent text editor and a head full of HTML tags.

There's no denying that this method ultimately produces the best results and the gives greater control over layouts but it's all so difficult. Isn't it?

O'Reilly's Web Design in a Nutshell aims to prove that it needn't be.

This superb book gives a no-nonsense overview of HTML programming starting from the ground up and encapsulating some of the more advanced topics some lesser books choose not to approach.

Everything is so well presented it makes for easy reading even when not sitting at your computer. It's nice to see such good support for multiple browsers too--the book gives information about which commands will work with which browser so it's easy to produce more universally accessible sites.

Although this is not aimed squarely at the beginner it's so well written it should be on any prespective coder's bookshelf from an early stage. An excellent read --Andrew Russell

Review
'This book should find its way on to the desk of anyone actively involved in web design, where I would expect it to become well used.' PING, December 2001 'If you were only going to buy one book on web design, this would have to be it.' - Daf Tregear, news@ukuug

Customer Reviews

Great Book - Wait for 3rd edition.
I bought the 2nd edition of this book when it was published and found it extremely useful. The 3rd edition is due soon - wait for it and don't be tempted to buy the old edition (things have changed in the world of HTML).

Over-stuffed nuts!
The idea of having a single volume with the nitty gritty of HTML, in all its flavours, Cascading Style Sheets, DHTML, XML, Web graphics, audio, and video, CGI, SSI, and Javascript is too tempting for anyone professionally involved with the web to ignore. A collection of the O'Reilly & Associates books on each individual subject will take up many inches of shelf space, so in the tradition of the Nutshell series, here is a single volume with the essential details for those of us who don't want to start at "Hello, World!" every time.

Does the book succeed? Certainly on all aspects of HTML, especially cross-browser issues, it is a perfect one-stop shop. I like the fact that Lynx gets more than a passing mention, and that accessibility for the blind and partially-sighted is covered. Cascading Style Sheets are well covered too, though it's unfortunate that the table of CSS compatibility is relegated to an Appendix, rather than integrated with the main chapter on CSS syntax. Chapters on GIFs and JPEGs are very informative, discussing all the salient points of palettes and compression. However the book clearly overreaches itself when it comes to DHTML, XML, CGI and Javascript, the chapters on these topics being much less in depth than for HTML, CSS and graphics. The author acknowledges these limitations more explicitly in the Preface than the publishers do on the back cover :-) These are good introductory discussions for those who want to move on from basic HTML, but anyone wanting a genuine desktop guide to these topics will have to fork out for a separate tome. (ORA's DHTML, CGI and Javascript books are excellent, by the way, but we're still waiting for them to come up with the definitive XML manual.)

One other criticism (which I'm surprised to find myself making of an ORA book): web browsers and related tools on Windows and Macintosh are well-covered, but Unix/Linux tools barely get a look in. What features are/aren't supported on Unix versions of Netscape? Doesn't the GIMP graphics program deserve a mention?

Quibbles apart, Web Design in a Nutshell is the sort of book that every web designer needs: essential, yes, but not as comprehensive and quintessential as I'd hoped (however unreasonably!), so I'll have to knock off one crown!

A thorough guide to html (1st edition)
This is one book that I use every day - provided I can extract it from the fingers of my cow-orkers who keep borrowing it ! Every tag is described in depth, and it is one of the few books I've come across that describes CSS in a meaningful way.