Bulletproof Web Design

I know it isn’t normal of me to review books but I guess I could get started with this. Now when Ariel needs to do some movie screening, I need to tour the complex for about an hour or two. So happens yesterday we were at Midvalley and I decided to spend my time in MPH.

Both books that I picked from the shelf were about websites but one written by a local author and the other by Dan Cederholm. He’s the author and owner of Simplebits.

The first book I browsed was about Malaysia e-commerce websites. I was rather surprised to actually see a book on e-commerce written by a Malaysian. It’s not meant to be insulting but it’s because I’ve never seen any Malaysian do it.

The book was a good start explaining the various processses in creating an e-commerce website. The author actually guides the reader of the types of users and the several different goals they wish to accomplish. I was even more astounded when he had a metrics system dividing the e-commerce development into phases in accordance to client needs.

However, after I read all of that, the next chapter baffled me. I noticed that the author was teaching readers how to use the e-commerce websites in Malaysia mostly. It was a step-by-step guide of using the website through pictorial guides. And this didn’t end in just one chapter, the author distributed the e-commerce pictorial guides into categories. There was a guide on using travel websites, holiday websites, flower websites and etc.

I don’t know about you, but is a book like this worth RM22? It’s not much to pay for a website related book not only because it’s printed locally but is a pictorial guide printed in monochrome worth the value?

As for the second book, I like. It’s called Bulletproof Web Design by Dan Cederholm. Just by browsing the book, I can’t believe that I picked up a lot of useful tips. Not only did he teach to code in compliant markup but it was easy to be understood. I only needed to refer to the codes and read certain areas when he was explaining how to achieve something.

He touched several important issues in the book other than standards compliancy. He taught the methods and understanding of a flexible layout that is also known as liquid layouts. These layout though width dependant can flex according to your screen size. The benefits of this is that viewers on widescreens won’t have to stare into space as much.

Dan also provided a great guide for styling tables and if you didn’t know, tables are only assumed to be evil when used for layouts. Currently, tables are used for holding data like accounting numbers or dates and etc. But soon enough, when CSS3 is implemented universally, we might be seeing more of CSS Swag: Multi-Column Lists.

I also saw Dan’s other book on the shelf but didn’t have anymore time to spend on the sofa since Ariel already finished her duty. But I was rather surprised when I saw the book being published FriendsofEd. I don’t know, it just came of a surprise to me. This’ll be the next book I’ll be reading when I get a chance to sit on the sofe again.