Photoshop Tricks

5 Comments for this entry

• John S. Ryan
  July 20th, 2010 on 3:41 pm

  Review by John S. Ryan for Web Design in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference (In a Nutshell (O’Reilly))
  Rating:
  When a book is as good as this one, later editions can’t improve it; they can only update it.That’s what this one does. The second edition of Jennifer Niederst’s comprehensive reference on web design now takes account of HTML 4.01; the stuff on browsers takes account of Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and Netscape 6.And what else is there to say? Just like the first edition (but with a handful of additional topics and updates to the existing ones), this volume provides a thorough “desktop quick reference” on the entire spectrum of web design — a general introduction to and overview of the Web itself; authoring using HTML, cascading style sheets, and server side includes; graphics (GIF, JPEG, and PNG formats, colors, and animation); multimedia (audio, video, Flash, Shockwave, and introductory Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language); and advanced topics like JavaScript, DHTML, XML, XHTML, WAP, and WML. The appendices still provide easily-thumbable tables of HTML elements, attributes, tags nobody officially likes anymore, proprietary (i.e., browser-specific) tags, a chart showing which browsers support which CSS features, and all the special characters you can use in HTML (you know, &#these; &#things;).And you probably also already know who Jen Niederst is; if not, go read my review of her book _Learning Web Design_, which you should buy first anyway if you’re new to the subject. Anyway, she’s a terrific writer with intimate knowledge of all the little details you need to know in order to do web design effectively; guides just don’t come any better.You know all of this already if you have the first edition. If not, then all you need to know is that this is an updated version of — no contest — the best available single-volume reference on web design, written by — no contest — the person best qualified to write it. It’s complete; it’s accessible; it’s well-designed; it’s O’Reilly.Oh — and the “least weasel” is the species of weasel pictured on the cover.
• Meryl K. Evans
  July 20th, 2010 on 3:48 pm

  Review by Meryl K. Evans for Web Design in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference (In a Nutshell (O’Reilly))
  Rating:
  This book takes novice to intermediate designers to the next level and is also useful as a desktop quick reference. Many buy such books and end up never opening them or maybe a few times before it’s outdated. I admit I’m one of those people, but not when it comes to the weasel (picture on the cover) book. This is the book the professor assigned for one of my first Web design classes and it is responsible for my learning tables, CSS, and knowing when to make a graphics file .gif or .jpg.

  It’s the most well worn Web design book I have in my collection and the only HTML book I ever bought. Thankfully, there is little that’s changed in the format of the book because it wasn’t broken. Robbins takes the appropriate steps to update it and expand the sections that are more relevant today.

  Expect an entire orchestra of instruments relevant to Web design, along with the specific details and tricks you should know. It may seem a bit much that Niederst covers HTML, CSS, SSI, graphics, multimedia, JavaScript, DHTML, XML, XHTML, WAP, and WML. However, she appropriately magnifies essential things while the advanced or “you may want to explore” topics are touched upon to give an idea of how it works with suggestions for further reading

  The book starts off by addressing the biggest challenge of designing a site that looks good in every browser and version. “Designing for a Variety of Browsers” has a two-page chart of various browsers and versions for the Windows, Macintosh, and UNIX environments, showing what each supports and doesn’t support.

  The next chapter covers another source of frustration for designers, “Designing for a Variety of Displays.” If you monitor your Web visitor stats, then you’ll probably notice that no size leads the majority especially with WebTV, handheld, and cellular devices accessing the Internet. There are screen shots of browser and system measurements and tips for designing for various displays.

  Chapter 26, “Flash and Shockwave” explains what it is, advantages and disadvantages, introduces you to the Flash interface, adding a Flash file to a Web page, and integrating it with other technologies. Flash is a whole different animal and the book gives you the big picture of how it fits with designing Web pages. The following chapter on SMIL covers the same basics.

  Part V addresses the advanced technologies including JavaScript, DHTML, XML, XHTML, and WAP and WML. It’s useful to have these all close together at the end of the book to help you figure out which you may want to use for a Web project.

  As useful as special characters can be, I never remember what to type to make the symbol appear, though I know these now. Finding the special character chart is the only complaint I had from the original edition and not even the index helped me find it, so I had to tab the page. This has now been remedied with one of the best improvements of moving the special character reference chart to the appendix for speedy access. Other appendices in the book are listings of HTML tags, attributes, deprecated tags, proprietary tags, and CSS compatibility and support.

  As your design skills and knowledge grow, there is always a question that prompts you to open the book and get your answer. It holds true today as I retire the worn out book with a loose page thanks to a certain child and happily replace it with its new younger sibling.

  ***3rd edition update***
  
  The third edition took a bigger leap from the second than the second took from the first. Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd ed., comes with a greater focus on Web standards and cascading style sheets (CSS). In fact, the book opens with a chapter on Web standards, whereas it was merely a footnote in the previous edition.

  Rather than a sole chapter on HTML, the markup chapter blends HTML and XHTML. The chapter comes with notes explaining the major differences between HTML and XHTML. The greater emphasis on XHTML ensures newer designers dive right into XHTML and improve their chances of designing standards compliant Web pages. Furthermore, the appendix includes HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0 and 1.1, and CSS 2.1 references.

  Ajax and WCAG 2.0 have barely been around in terms of publishing time. While the Ajax process isn’t new, but its terminology and popularity are recent. Both items are covered, albeit briefly. Had Robbins wrote the book now, Ajax would not likely get huge coverage as it’s a little advanced for the book’s purposes and target market.

  Accessible forms, mobile devices, internationalization, JavaScript with document object model (DOM), and document structure also gain more attention in the third edition. On the same token, the book reduces coverage of concepts that have gotten less attention such as the Web palette (Web safe colors), SMIL (synchronized multimedia integration language), frames, and DHTML.

  Part III is devoted to CSS, which contains 10 new chapters — a must as CSS becomes a design standard not something to play with. The third edition superbly reflects today’s Web development environment and still sticks to its main purpose — helping new and intermediate designers get up to speed on Web design. The book continues its role as a valuable reference.
• David Salter
  July 20th, 2010 on 4:25 pm

  Review by David Salter for Web Design in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference (In a Nutshell (O’Reilly))
  Rating:
  This was my first purchase from the Nutshell series and I was particularly pleased with the content. The layout is very tidy and easy to navigate.I would consider my knowledge of the internet and web design at an intermediate level, and I would recommend this book to anyone other than a complete novice. Each section is concise and to the point and does not assume too much.The section on CGI scripting and Server Side Includes, I found invaluable. It was easily explained in basic terms and provided plenty of examples to get these working. In addition there are lots of references in the book to resources available on the web.All in all a thoroughly enjoyable read, if you want only one web reference book on your desk this year, this should be it.
• sonytoao
  July 20th, 2010 on 5:22 pm

  Review by sonytoao for Web Design in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference (In a Nutshell (O’Reilly))
  Rating:
  This is a nutshell book, plain and simple. It’s not intended to teach you HTML but it will help you hone your coding and web design skills. I read this book after learning HTML from Sams’ “Teach Yourself HTML in 4 Hours.” The former provided the appetizer, this book provides the meat and potatoes. It’s best feature is the tips and tricks sprinkled throughout each section, particularly as they apply to getting the same effect in different browsers. The book also highlights IE quirks and Netscape bugs for various HTML tags and provides examples for workarounds. Most invaluable are the various tables included in the text: “MIME Types and Subtypes by Extension,” “Decimal to Hexadecimal Equivalents,” “Colors w/ their RGB and Web-safe hex values,” and a full listing of character entities (@=@). You may be able to find this info. elsewhere, but rarely in one location as it is here. I would highly recommend this reference for any webmaster’s desktop library.
• calvinnme
  July 20th, 2010 on 5:36 pm

  Review by calvinnme for Web Design in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference (In a Nutshell (O’Reilly))
  Rating:
  This book focuses on frontend matters of web design and development: markup, style sheets, image production, multimedia, and so on. Ironically, despite its title, there is little in the way of “design” advice, per se. Rather, it strives to be a thorough reference for the technical details and requirements faced in day-to-day work designing and developing web content. Although it is a good introduction to all subjects covered, if you really want to dig into the details of any particular technology, you will probably need other reference books. As far as “big picture” instruction, though, I highly recommend it. I review the book further in the context of its table of contents. The book is divided into six parts plus appendixes, each covering a general subject area.

  Part I: The Web Environment
  
  Chapter 1, Web Standards, describes the current approach to web design and sets the stage for the entire book. It is essential reading. Chapters on designing for varying browsers and displays provide useful overviews of the unique challenges web developers face. Chapter 5, Accessibility, and Chapter 6, Internationalization, both serve as introductions to the ways web content may be created to reach all users, regardless of ability, browsing device, or language. Chapter 4, A Beginner’s Guide to the Server, is a primer on basic server functions, system commands, uploading files, and file types.

  Part II: The Structural Layer: XML and (X)HTML
  
  This part of the book is about document markup, commonly referred to as the structural layer because it provides the foundation upon which presentation (styles) and behaviors (scripting) are applied. Chapter 7, Introduction to XML, covers critical concepts that guide the way (X)HTML is handled in contemporary web design. Chapters 8 through 15 focus on HTML and XHTML markup, including detailed descriptions of all the elements and the way they should be used in standards-based web design.

  Part III: The Presentation Layer: Cascading Style Sheets
  
  Part III provides a thorough guide to using CSS for controlling the presentation of web content with a focus on visual media. It begins with an overview of the fundamentals in Chapter 16 and continues on with an introduction to CSS selectors in Chapter 17. Chapters 18 through 23 provide detailed descriptions of all the visual properties in the CSS 2.1 specification. Finally, examples of how CSS is used in the real world are provided in CSS Techniques (Chapter 24) and Managing Browser Bugs: Workarounds, Hacks, and Filters (Chapter 25).

  Part IV: The Behavioral Layer: JavaScript and the DOM
  
  Part IV is all about adding interactivity to your pages with JavaScript. Chapter 26 is an introduction to JavaScript, and covers syntax, control structures, object-orientation, and the whys and hows of unobtrusive scripting. Chapter 27 introduces the Document Object Model and shows how to tap into it to manipulate both content and design. As a supplement to Chapter 27,a brief introduction to Ajax techniques is included that will help you on your way to building richer Internet applications.

  Part V: Web Graphics
  
  The chapters in Part V contain essential information on working with RGB color and choosing the appropriate graphic file formats. The chapters dedicated to GIF, JPEG, and PNG graphics offer practical tips for graphic production and optimization based on the compression schemes used by each format. The Animated GIFs chapter is a further examination of GIF’s animation capabilities.

  Part VI: Media
  
  Because the Web is not limited to text and images, Part VI is included to provide a basic introduction to adding audio, video, and Flash movies to web pages. There is also a chapter on printing from web pages using print-specific CSS style sheets as well as an introduction to the PDF format for document distribution.

  Appendixes
  
  The Appendixes in this book are very useful. Appendix A is an alphabetical listing of all elements and attributes in the HTML 4.01 Recommendation, as well as a few nonstandard elements that are well supported and in common use. Appendix B is an alphabetical listing of all properties defined in the CSS 2.1 specification. Appendix C lists all the character entities defined in HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 with their numerical references. Appendix D provides a detailed explanation of the color names and RGB color values used both in (X)HTML and CSS. Finally, Appendix E describes the future of XHTML and Microformats.