Posted by on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 6:48 pm.
For web designers, books may seem a little like a thing of the past, especially with the wealth of available knowledge through tutorials, videos, and online communities. However, I’ll be looking into some of the hottest and most valuable titles to feed your thirst for supremacy through web knowledge.
Experts in their field
Now, having never written a website design book myself, I can’t really give any valuable insight into the inevitable struggles one could expect to encounter along the way. I always think it is important to remember that before embarking on the relentless journey of writing a book, I would certainly imagine you have to have a level of confidence in your knowledge, in relation your chosen specialist subject. It is through this that we can learn from a structured account of everything they’d deem important to know.
Following online tutorials can certainly help when it comes to quick fixes, or particular subjects, but they won’t necessarily give you the all-round understanding that studying a book indeed would.
5 Recommended Website Design Books
1. Learning JQuery 1.3 by Jonathan Chaffer, Karl Swedberg
This book will give you everything that you need to know to really be at the cutting edge of the website design industry, with so many readily available technologies for the web, JQuery seems to be holding it’s own, allowing you to refine traditional web usability, ensuring better form validation, slick animations of elements, server-side manipulation of DOM and Ajax to name but a few uses.
This book will help you cover all angles, from understanding to implementation, even progressing as far as writing your own JQuery Plugins.
2. Adobe Flash CS4 Professional: Classroom in a Book by Adobe
At seems an age ago since Flash was warmly welcomed into the arms of the Adobe family. Since then, they have had the chance to get their teeth into the application and really enhance the software’s core functionality.
With so many new features including inverse kinematics, enhanced 3D engine and more refinement from Actionscript 3.0, It would seem most beneficial to stoke for knowledge from the horses mouth. This is an official book put together by the very creators of Flash, and contains 10 compelling lessons to work through.
3. CSS Website design by Eric A. Meyer
CSS is certainly the new master of the web universe, as all things web now use CSS from basic HTML to JQuery and complex application development. With all his experience what better man to show you the CSS ropes that the guru himself Eric Meyer. I’m sure all you experienced designers who remember the days before CSS and indeed followed it’s rise to supremacy will have heard of Eric on your travels. This book doesn’t just look into how to use CSS, but more importantly giving you insight into how these techniques can be used in modern website design.
4. PHP 6 and MySQL 5 for dynamic Website Design: Visual Quickpro Guide by Larry Ullman
With the latest releases from these open source heavyweights now readily available, this book will give you all the required knowledge to build cutting edge dynamic database driven websites. PHP and MySQL go together like lamb and mint sauce.
Veteran author and database design specialist Larry Ullman will guide you through a host of compelling subjects aimed towards website design skill levels from the novice right through to the hardened expert, and covers such topics as security, sessions and cookies and dynamic applications.
5. The Web Designers Idea Book by Patrick McNeil
For the last choice for my 5 great books, I’ve selected a more generic website design book. This little beauty gives you a great selection of modern website design examples for you to whet you whistle with. A little inspiration can go a long way, so why not take a look at Patrick McNeil’s collection of great designs.
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