I picked up a few Sitepoint books during their 5 PDFs for the price of 1 sale last week. I finished reading two of them this week, so here are my reviews for The Principles of Beautiful Web Design
Of these two books, I enjoyed The Principles of Beautiful Web Design the most. It’s separated into sections on Layout and Composition, Color, Texture, Typography & Imagery. Obviously these aren’t as in depth as an entire book on each section, but it serves as a great introduction for each principle. Along with general tips and theories on each section, the book also follows along with a real life example. This really helps to see the principles in practice. With that said, the author is careful not to say that their method is the only way, but does give a lot of advice on how to organize the creation of a website. I also learned that there are a few principles that I need to work on, mainly Typography & Texture. This book is highly recommended since it’s good for a straight read thru, but also worth keeping on the shelf for reference.
Everything You Know About CSS is Wrong! looks at the future of web design. The major event coming up that brings about this discussion is the release of Internet Explorer 8. With Internet Explorer 8, all of the major browsers will support table styles. With table styles, grid layouts will be a lot easier to create. This is the genesis for the title of the book. While I’m excited about the future possibilities of CSS and the death of IE6 (and to a lesser extent, IE7), this book holds most of it’s value in the first read through. I doubt I’ll go back to this for reference. Once IE8 does come out, there will still be a long time that I’ll be using floats and positioning until IE7 is finally phased out (even if it’s with two different stylesheets). Either way, this was still an interesting read and has me thinking about the future of CSS and Grid Design.
