Although I have compiled a bookshelf of web design and development references, a short list of the essentials might be useful to the web designer on a budget. If I had to choose just a few, here are the books I’d place on my shelf for quick reference:
With this little library, you’ll be able to plan, design, and build a professional web site from start to finish. The basic principles of design, typography, interaction design, Information Architecture, Usability, Web Standards development, and operating as a freelancer are covered in detail in these books. Anything more you might need to know can probably be found online for free.
Jeremy Keith of Clear Left has written a new book that will be released soon entitled Bulletproof Ajax. I’m sure you’ve heard of or hopefully read Dan Cederholm’s Bulletproof Web Design, which examines methods of building sites that prevent the display from breaking in all situations. This new book is along the same lines, but focused instead on some new ideas behind the use of Ajax. Jeremy Keith is also the author of the popular book DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model, which leads me to believe this forthcoming book will be equally as useful and well written. What’s interesting about Bulletproof Ajax is it will be, to my knowledge, the first book on the market that discusses graceful degradation of Ajax functionality (dubbed Hijax by Kieth himself). Keith has a nice presentation he gave at Web Directions South this past September that sums up the core concepts of Hijax that is a good read as you wait for his book to be released. An MP3 of the presentation was to be released as well, but as of yet is not out. You may also want to check out Kieth’s original article about graceful degradation of Ajax, the follow up where the term Hijax is coined, and his sample application which puts into practice these concepts.
Now that you are getting interested in implementing Microformats on your sites, you may find a cheat sheet of all major Microformats for fast reference a handy tool. Brian Suda, the author of this useful cheat sheet also wrote a book on Microformats, published by O’reilly. Think Vitamin reviewed the 45 page PDF book favorably.
There are some good books on the market to help introduce you to the ways in which Ajax and PHP can work together to create user-friendly web applications. Apress recently released a book by Lee Babin entitled Beginning Ajax with PHP: From Novice to Professional. The book does a good job of introducing key concepts by way of useful examples that solve common problems. It’s currently my favorite for bridging the gap between the two technologies.
SitePoint also has a nice book on Ajax entitled Build Your Own Ajax Web Applications. This book is focused specifically on Ajax, not so much about connecting client-side to server-side scripts.
Mark Boulton, a web designer out of the UK, will be self-publishing a PDF book entitled Five Simple Steps: Designing for the Web. Boutlon has offered some great design advice on his blog along these lines, advice that is quite sharp and worth heeding. The book will sell for $19 from his site, but you can get $5 off if you sign up for his mailing list. Seems like a fair trade to me. To get a taste of the quality of content and insights the book will cover, take a look at this post about typography on the web.
“Five Simple Steps: Designing for the web is a web design book with a difference. Too many design books show pretty pictures and don’t actually teach much. Five Simple Steps: Designing for the Web changes this by focusing on applying the core principles of graphic design to the web.”
- Mark Boulton
