The Principles of Beautiful Web Design by Jason Beaird My rating: 5 of 5 stars An excellent introduction to the artistic side of web design. Beaird teaches that a site’s design should reinforce the identity of the organization, and expertly shows how to use layout and composition, color, texture, typography, and imagery. He explains the [...]
Creating a Website: the Missing Manual by Matthew MacDonald My rating: 3 of 5 stars This book is a decent introduction to many topics related to web design; too many topics, in my opinion. I expected the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but a large part of the book teaches how to use Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, [...]
CSS Web Site Design Hands on Training by Eric A. Meyer My rating: 3 of 5 stars An elementary, step-by-step illustrated guide by CSS master Eric Meyer. The book’s a good introduction to CSS, but it only covers the basics; it uses a simple, 2-column site for demonstrations, and doesn’t provide any advanced CSS techniques. [...]
HTML, XHTML & CSS For Dummies by Ed Tittel My rating: 2 of 5 stars I can’t recommend this book; there are several that do are better for introductory HTML and CSS. It’s quite broad, covering many Web technologies, but it’s not very deep. It focuses on HTML and CSS, but also touches on scripting [...]
Sams Teach Yourself HTML and CSS in 24 Hours by Julie C. Meloni My rating: 3 of 5 stars This is a decent introduction to HTML and CSS. Its main advantages over other books of this type are the full color examples and syntax-highlighted code snippets. The explanations and examples are simple and easily understood. [...]
Web Design: A Beginner’s Guide Second Edition by Wendy Willard My rating: 2 of 5 stars This book is probably only useful if you’re completely new to web design. The book itself isn’t very educational, but it includes dozens of references to tools, sites, and services that are useful for learning web design. The most [...]
Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML by Elisabeth Freeman My rating: 4 of 5 stars The best introductory book on HTML and CSS I’ve read so far. It focuses on (X)HTML and CSS, with a short chapter on graphics and barely a mention of scripting or other web topics. So it’s not as broad [...]
Learning Web Design: A Beginner’s Guide to HTML, CSS, Graphics, and Beyond by Jennifer Niederst Robbins My rating: 3 of 5 stars This is the most comprehensive book on HTML and CSS I’ve read so far. It reads like a textbook and is quite impersonal, which is a shame because author Jennifer Niederst Robbins has [...]
Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is one of the most popular web design books, and for good reason. Zeldman has been around the Web for a long time, and his experience shows. This book teaches the concepts, history, and technologies behind web design for beginning and [...]
WordPress Theme Design by Tessa Blakeley Silver My rating: 3 of 5 stars This book does a decent job teaching WordPress theme design. It walks you through wireframing, writing the HTML and CSS, and creating graphics, then building a WordPress theme from those pieces. It’s mostly WordPress-specific, addressing the WordPress Loop, template files, template tags, [...]