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Tag: book summary

Review: Sams Teach Yourself HTML5 in 10 Minutes by Steven Holzner

Sams Teach Yourself HTML5 in 10 Minutes (5th Edition) by Steven Holzner My rating: 2 of 5 stars This short book contains 10 brief lessons covering some of what's new in HTML5: drawing with the canvas element, dragging and dropping, form controls, video and audio, and storage. Each lesson introduces elements and their attributes, briefly […]

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Review: WordPress Bible by Aaron Brazell

WordPress Bible by Aaron Brazell My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is a comprehensive WordPress book; topics include getting started, plugin development, theme development, content management, and maintenance. I’m a web designer who creates WordPress sites for small businesses, so I focused on SEO, plugin recommendations, and theme development, and skimmed plugin development. My […]

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Review: Web Design: A Beginner's Guide Second Edition by Wendy Willard

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 […]

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Review: Head First WordPress by Jeff Siarto

Head First WordPress by Jeff Siarto My rating: 3 of 5 stars This book is short and very high-level, dedicating only 1 or 2 pages to most topics. It's best for beginners or intermediate WordPress users. It covers styling a theme, managing users, managing categories and tags, embedding video, podcasting, security, and performance. I liked […]

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Review: Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML by Elisabeth Freeman

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 […]

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Book review: Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug

Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug My rating: 4 of 5 stars An excellent introduction to creating usable websites. As the title states, every website’s design and functionality should be so simple that people barely need to think to use it. The book’s 2nd edition is from […]

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Book review: Learning Web Design: A Beginner's Guide to HTML, CSS, Graphics, and Beyond by Jennifer Niederst Robbins

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 […]

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Book review: Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman

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 […]

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Book review: WordPress Theme Design by Tessa Blakeley Silver

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, […]

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Book review: WordPress In Depth by Bud E. Smith and Michael McCallister

WordPress In Depth by Bud E. Smith My rating: 3 of 5 stars Based on the title, I expected to be overwhelmed by the “in depth”, technical details of WordPress. Instead, I was bored by the first 3 parts, which are mainly aimed at novice WordPress.com bloggers, and explain posts, graphics, links, and content creation. […]

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Book review: Web Design All-in-One For Dummies

Web Design All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies by Sue Jenkins My rating: 3 of 5 stars A simple, visual reference for beginning web designers. Five books in one, covering many areas related to web design, including planning, designing, graphics, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, web standards, testing, hosting, and search engine optimization. In her examples, the author […]

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Book review: Teach Yourself VISUALLY Web Design by Rob Huddleston

Teach Yourself VISUALLY Web Design (Teach Yourself VISUALLY by Rob Huddleston My rating: 2 of 5 stars Absolute novices may benefit from this book's introduction to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and SQL, but it's so elementary that it's useless for anyone with any web design experience. Only the essentials of each technology are covered, so […]

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