It does exactly what it says on the tin! erm.. cover! (Web Design in a Nutshell - Jennifer Niederst)

Member Name: The Duke

Product:	Web Design in a Nutshell - Jennifer Niederst
Date:	02/03/01 (21 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good information, good format

Disadvantages: Not for beginners, some parts not "readable"

As the title may suggest, “Web Design in a Nutshell” is a one-stop shop for designing a web site. It’s not really a tutorial book as such, and some experience or knowledge (albeit very little) is required before you will get the best out of the book.

If you wish, you can read it as a tutorial book, and although not written to be such a thing, can actually be quite useful. Some pieces of it are interesting reading, and some just aren’t meant to be read in the traditional manner (more on this later).

I first became aware of this book because it’s a required textbook for a multimedia course I’m studying at university. Having seen some of the textbooks I have been advised to buy, I approached this one with caution, although I shouldn’t have worried. It cost me £14.96 from Amazon.co.uk, who quote a list price of £19.99 although there aren’t any sterling prices quoted on the book, only US and Canadian dollars.

It’s set out in a logical fashion, in a number of bigger parts, which are split into smaller chapters. Each chapter usually deals with one topic.

The first part deals with issues such as fonts, colours, display areas of monitors, site and file maps as well as other minor points such as file naming issues etc. It’s basically an introduction to the sort of things you should be aware of before sitting down and hammering out your HTML – very informative, and easy reading.

The second part deals with HTML. In a manner that I’ve yet to see in any other book on this subject, the author deals with HTML tags, and descriptions of how they work, and how to implement them. Other information given includes browsers compatibility i.e. Netscape 2,3,4 / Explorer 2,3,4,5 / WebTV or even Opera. It even mentions whether the tag is expected to make it into the HTML4 specification!

Part three deals with graphics – GIF, JPEGs and PNG files, as well as the we
b safe palette. Again, easy to read, and informative.

The fourth part deals with multimedia and interactivity – animations, sounds, streaming media as well as javascript.

Part five is entitled “Emerging Technologies”, and as you might expect mentions such topics as CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), DHTML (Dynamic HTML) and XML (eXtensible Markup Language)

The last part is the appendices which covers a lot of the HTML information from earlier in the book, but displays it in a slightly different manner, so in this section you might find HTML tags that are only supported by certain browsers, or a list of attributes for each tag. Very handy indeed if you code your web sites by hand, or want to tidy up the workings of a WYSIWYG HTML editor.

As I hinted at above, you can’t really sit down and read this book from cover to cover – some parts of it are just too technical, or just a list of tags and properties. Some other chapters however, are very easy to read, and if you are interested in the subject will teach you a lot. But for me, the title says it all – “Web Design in a Nutshell – A Quick Desktop Reference”.

Beginners could get some use out of it, but it will prove to be most useful to those of use who already have an idea of what they’re doing, but would like something close at hand to refer to once in a while. The closest thing to an HTML “bible” I’ve seen. If only some programming books were this easy to read!

Summary: