Rating:

3

Gamification seems to have been the big thing for a while. Maybe we have heard too much of it. Some would say we have been over sold on gamification, making it the wonder child that will make your websites work and attract and keep customers.

Gamification by Design – by Gabe Zichermann and Chris Cunningham is the recommended discussion seed book for UXPerth this month (April 2012). I don’t often review the books for UXPerth, unless they are amazingly outstanding or something a lot worse.

Game Design and Beyond

This book was published in 2011 so it seems to have been written late 2010. This is a telling factor on some of the examples given in the book, more on that later. As with most titles of this type it is very US centric, which really should have been looked at.

It deals with an introduction to gamification techniques, at 170 pages, it’s a quick read, even more so if you skip sections.

The book discusses aspects of loyalty generation, motivation both intrinsic and extrinsic, overall game mechanics, engagement and reinforcement techniques. Pretty much all the major techniques are covered off reasonably well.

A good quarter of the book is a developmental tutorial involving step wise (using ruby) code examples of gamification. Which I didn’t find to be that useful at all.

The final chapter is nothing more than a sponsored insert, like those brought “sponsor” talks at conferences, this was a waste of space.  Plus it dealt with badges, which are the worst aspect of gamiification.

When you read this book you aren’t really sure if you are reading a book on gamification or game design.  So many times the examples quoted where just pure games, games that people would use as distractors or time fillers rather than example of commercial sites or applications using the same techniques for commercial gain.

The case studies that I was hoping to be a core aspect of the book, seemed to be too brief or in several cases dated very quickly; such as Yahoo Answers or Quora. However the examples dating is often an issue with light weight tech books.

Maybe this is a US thing, but Yahoo Answers have never been relevant here. It just seemed overloaded with bad information, even years ago. Quora well that’s really slid into a place of all noise no information in the last year.

Also some case studies I have never heard of.. like Health Month, again I’ll assume it’s a US thing like Starbucks or the like.

A good deal of the time a found myself wanting to see the research, or the data at least, behind the bold statements on behaviour on this or that technique, now I’m sure Zichermann has them, but why aren’t they in the book.

After a while it just became a very frustrating read.

In fact if I hadn’t been using an ebook version I know I would have thrown this book across the room a good number of times.   As a UX consultant I read lot, and frankly this book although technically good,  just lacked supporting documentation. I would have normally discarded this book into the reject pile within the first few chapters.

A Word on Gamification

Maybe I’m not the best person to review this book. I’m not a current gamer. I used to be, then I discovered life is too precious to be wasted on mindless addictive games that don’t get you anywhere.

So when the authors talk about engaging people, about hooking them in with leader boards, achievements or other methods, I understand the concept, but just don’t get as to why people would be sucked in.

Sure I understand the techniques, but on a personal level what’s not to stop the person returning to the real world and abandoning this silly internal quest an app or site has set for them.

Maybe I need to see this happening with real people with some user testing.

There really has to be something in it for the user beyond stupid badges – yes I do mean Four Square – another poster child in this book.  A good deal of the good assumes it know why the techniques are working, but doesn’t show any details.

Then there is also a the ethics of all this tobe considered, with addictive gamification hooking a user into a almost gambling like habit isn’t really that ethical.  Its nice the way this book neatly sidesteps the issue. Not even referring to ethical aspect left a bitter taste in my mouth.

Being aware of ethical of nay UX manipulation of an audience is something  any UX professional needs to be aware of.

Gamification Didn’t Invent the World

Anything in the UX world that is a design pattern or now standard technique for engagement or audience retention has it seems has suddenly become a gamification aspect. For example from forum post ranking to star rating to summary control panels these are all now gamification.  Years ago in 2000 they were called community engagement.

Now I have followed, seen, used and designed  lots of these techniques as they have developed over the years, I can tell you they didn’t appear suddenly from the world of games design.

There seems to be an over zealous desire to label everything as being from “game design”  in this book.

Overall

If you are a developer or designer is this book any good?  Well yes and no.

It’s a good introduction text in relation to the techniques and what behavioural effects they are meant to have.  But I would take the examples with a grain of salt.

As a UX consultant I could have lost half the book without noticing.

It’s not a badly written book. It does show you the techniques and methods used in gamification, for that I’ve given it 3 stars. If you just want the core information, then yes this book does supply that. Some say it’s the number one book in gamification, this isn’t my view.

I have this feeling throughout the book maybe the editor should have been a little more questioning of the references than the code.

If you do buy this book, please go get the cheaper ebook. Save yourself some money.

Rating:

3

I’m an advocate of prototyping. I’ll even go so far as to recommend that wireframing be reduce to just sketching in favour of prototyping. Still prototyping in a UX environment can sometimes be one of those things that you don’t always get to practice when you would like to.

This is where Rosenfeld’s book Prototyping – A Practitioner’s Guide by Todd Zaki Warfel can fill in some of those nagging holes.

Now I enjoyed this book. I’m firmly in the audience demographic that this book is pitched at,  which is good.  Todd presents a concise overview of the art and science of prototyping, the upside and the downside are equally balanced within the book. That is what makes it so refreshing to read.   However…

The Good and the Bad

The first 7 chapters deal with a recommend guide to implementation of prototyping, including paper prototyping. This is well presented concise and worthwhile. As is the last 2 chapters on HTML prototyping and an overview on prototype testing. All these chapters are just what you need for the basics of prototyping, while still offering some extra detail for the experienced UX professional.

However there are a number of points within the book that I found just didn’t gel well with me. Now I have nothing against Todd, I’m sure we have a lot of passionate view points in common. It’s just part of this book feels wrong to me.

You see in the middle of the book are a series of chapters that discuss how to prototype with various desktop applications.

I really would love to know why there is an extra four chapters stuffed into this book reviewing the very basics of using PowerPoint, Visio, Fireworks and Axure Pro as prototyping tools.

These chapters  are nothing more than a step wise guide to using the applications, a few minor points for prototyping with them.

Discussing any software products that aren’t generic is going to be a danger, as it immediately dates the book, considering the book was published in November 2009, it’s already dated. 
For instance where is MS-SketchFlow, the current UX darling of the hour.  Maybe we have a case of the Publisher forcing  Todd’s hand on this one, I hope not.  It’s as if these extra chapters have been added in to stuff the page count up.

You know this makes me wonder if Rosenfeld are really appealing to the UX professional or some other audience I don’t know off.

If the first section of the book wasn’t so damn useful I would have give this book a 2 star rating for these filler chapters.   If it has been published without these chapters I would rate this book as a must buy (4-4.5 stars), a concise guide to getting started with prototyping.  Sadly however for some reason it was published with these filler chapters so the 3 star rating stands.

The Chapters

The book starts where it should with a  wonderfully presented case for why anyone in the design process should be using prototyping, which can be very easily used on general business as well.   I remember reading this chapter with a big smile on my face, you can see that Todd has had to trot out these rebuffs time and time again to the same old anti prototype augments.

As expected the book deals with the prototyping process, it does this well, however I felt that this area could have done with a little more detail, nothing major, just a little more of Todds words.   One interesting aspect was the presentation of the five types of prototyping and the eight guiding principles, most of which are fairly common sense. However it does help to state them to remind people new and old to the prototyping ways.

I’m not going to review those four rogue chapters…

The chapters on paper and html prototyping  could  also have been a little longer with a few more examples, on  the pitfalls of the methods and ways to overcome them, still they where handy universal references for using prototyping.

Finally the book wraps with a discussion on prototype testing. Now this is not your usual user testing chapter. Sure it does talk about user testing for 8 odd pages, but the real gold here is in the list of common mistakes and ways to overcome them. This type of practice advice is invaluable to any UX professional.

Worthy of the UX Library or Not.

If any of you don’t know, by now, I hate fill in a book, with this book it was a chore read those middle chapters. In a way they spoilt a damn good reference book.

Now if you don’t have a prototyping guide, yes go out and buy this book. You can always skip those deadwood chapters, they add nothing to the book and you will not miss them.

However if you already have a prototyping reference, I would consider against buying this book, unless you really want it.

Rating:

4.5

As I’m designing forms I don’t usually have an issue making then usable or accessible within the limits of the clients budget.

However taking the form to the next level technically can sometimes be an issue. This is exactly what Fancy Form Design by Jina Bolton, Tim Connell and Derek Featherstone is all about, designing and building those great forms on the web.

When I first purchased this book (yes I do purchase my books, they aren’t usually review freebies) I was a little skeptical as to whether this book would have any content in it that would be relevant to me. This is an issue that I’m running into more and more these days.

I was surprised. I was expecting a dry developer focused book on form design. It is not. This is a good book, well worth the 4-5 hour read. I found that it wasn’t just one of those books you read once either, it’s also a great reference book.

This book is focused on the front end developer or back end developer that wants to enhance their forms. Even a UX designer like me with hands on skills will get something from this book.

While I was reading this book I was constantly thinking, well that’s great, but what about this accessibility or usability issue – yeah I can’t help it. But you know not a one or two paragraphs later I was presented with the solution or consideration for those issues. It’s great to see a practical book that is on same page as I am.

The Content

Interestingly the book layout parallels the way in which you design and develop an online form. The book itself walks you through a centralised case study for the development of a series of forms. Fancy Form Design is a book very heavy in code and visual examples as well, which makes it a very useful future reference tool.

The first section of the book deals with the planning phase of development, looking at the types of form elements, and the ways they are presently being  enhanced on the web. It also looks at the usual competitive analysis process. Moving on to my favourite part the interaction design of the form, now it doesn’t spend a lot of time in this area as there are some good books on the market already that handle this area in detail.  There is a bit of a discussion on task flows, paper prototyping and wireframing (which I personally think we can do without).

The form design section of the book walks through the usual suspects, of the grid, typography, the use of colour and micro imagery to enhance a form’s presentation. This section is about the graphical design only. It’s the next section that walks you through the building of the form.

You then get to the bones of the matter, the development of the form structure. There are a good series of examples here on how to build a form correctly to overcome most of the common accessibility and usability issues. Basic issues such as the correct practice for use of labels, error messages, required fields and help text are reviewed and discussed with clarity here.   This is an area you might think you know backwards, however it’s always worth a review on these matters.

Now we have the structure of the forms it’s time to use some CSS to style the final forms. Fancy Form Design walks you through the issues of using various resets and the various ways form elements render in different browsers (I’m looking at you IE) and ways to overcome them. I didn’t expect to find anything new in this section, and I didn’t, still your mileage may vary on this one.

The final chapter is on enhancing your forms beyond the stylised CSS/HTML layout with the help of jQuery.

This is the section I enjoyed the most in this book. It looked in detail at select menu, radio and checkbox styling as well as conditional question displays, date selectors, password strength indicators and a basic auto-complete. All this is presented in an easy to follow manner, which makes implementing these enhancements progressively on your forms, with jQuery, really easy. There is even a reminder about input validation, doing it on the client and server sides.

Only the downside, I personally think the last section of the form enhancement was a bit to short. I could have done with another 10-20 pages of additional enhancements to the case study in question. A little more detail on the  jQuery level would have been good too  (small birdie tells me watch for a Sitepoint jQuery Book very soon).

Finally – the last word

Overall it’s good book, entertaining, well written, not overly long, full of immediately practical examples that anyone familiar with form design and development can use.  It’s good to see more of these micro topic books being written than the large 500 page tomes of yesterday.

Side note: why have I been reviewing lots of Sitepoint books of late, well maybe it’s something to do with their range of books.

Rating:

4

I learnt card sorting via trial and error, lots of practice, reading the occasional blog or article, fine tuning as you go, that was while ago.

Back then Perth was a little isolated, in has only been recently that web based workshops or conferences have been held in Perth that we have had excess face to face with the best of the web.

This is where practical books like Donna Spencer’s Card Sorting can fill the gap.

Now you would think that this book would be a waste of time for someone like me.   Well that’s what I thought too, but I was wrong.

Donna’s book is filled with the shortcuts, pitfalls, and professional enhancements that you can make to your card sort technique.  It’s a lot more than just usual simple chapter on card sorting basics that so many books have.

It’s a short book (162 pages), one you can very easily read on a 5 hour plane flight (which I did).   However it isn’t light on detail. Donna Spencer seems to have crammed the entire card sorting process along with various case studies into this handy book.

The book begins at the best place, giving you an overview of what card sorting is and isn’t and the best places to apply it.   It’s interesting here as it is suggested that card sorting can be applied to all sorts of things not just web sites.  I can contest to this; have card sorts many a collection of topics or information in a effort to find the magical categorisation sequence.

The Nuts and Bots on How to Card Sort

Next the book launches right into the practical application on how to run a card sort.  It covers the best method to use, choosing the content, participants, card construction,  and session facilitation.  As well as bucket load of tips and tricks to help you out when your card sort is doing pear shaped.

The most important thing is to listen to the discussion. Make notes of the ways people describe what they are doing.

It’s interesting but this quote reminded me that sometimes you can also learn a lot more additional information, such as user stories and the like from just listening carefully to the participants during a card sort.  Hence a card sort can often product a wealth of information beyond the draft information organization.  Your just have to listen and question.

The Data Analysis of it All

This book also takes the time to step through the entire analysis process of the data you have collected during the sort.   It deals with the exploratory analysis process in detail and the intense drilling down into the organisational scheme people use.

Statistical Analysis is also covered, don’t worry you don’t need to be a maths scholar (or Steve Baty) to understand this section.  Card sorting very simply steps through the use of k-means cluster analysis, hierarchical cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling analysis, showing you the outcomes and why you need to use these analysis tools.

Donna rounds the book off with a brilliant summary chapter full of overarching advice.   My favourite is:

Don’t assume anything – think hard about what you have learned from the card sort and its underlying meaning.

Now I think we can apply that to all aspects of user research not just card sorting.

Should You Buy It?

If you’re card sorting guru (like Donna) then maybe this book is not for you.  But if you are a user experience or information management professional and just want to learn or improve your card sorting, then this book is a must have for your bookshelf.

Rating:

4

If you have read as many web design books as I have you find that they fall into basically two categories:

1. The ones in which the author waxes on about how wonderful they are at design, show off page after page of their own portfolio. The entire book becomes a publicity fest.
2. Then there is the type of book that is presented in a level headed manner, it is a great reference of the step by step process that web designers go through to product a web site.

Well Sexy Web Design by Elliot Jay Stocks is the latter, a well balanced guide that takes you through a clean conversation on how to create that next awesome web site.

The thing that I really like about this book is that it is to the point, it’s not overly weighty on the design theory, as it assumes you already have some of that skill locked away already. However  this book would still be ideal for a beginning designer.

Was it personally useful for me, well I’ll be honest, no it wasn’t. While I was reading this book I was just ticking off the points made one by one, noting that in reality there was nothing that I hadn’t already gained from experience. Now I have been doing this a long time, so I do get this a lot.  But it is good to know that Elliot in mu mind has covered off all the aspects of web design.

The book is divided into 6 chapters.

1. Overview of the design process, in which the design goals of an interface and the overall process are discussed.
2. Design Research, this chapter was so welcome, explaining why the brief is important, moving onto the  design inspirational process.
3. Site Structure, being involved with information architecture, I’m going to have a little bit of a bias here. It’s nice to see the  consideration of this design element before jumping into the high resolution design.
4. Navigation and Interaction, again I’m bias here, Elliot runs through a whistle stop tour of the common web interactive elements, and what works where and when.
5. Aesthetics, in this solid chapter Elliot looks at the usual design techniques, the grid, layout types (fixed, fluid, flexible, etc), color, mood boards, imagery types, typography  and the impact of emotion on the overall user experience.  In  a way this book is well worth its cost for  this chapter alone.
6. Final wrap is with the Deliverables,  so now you have that sexy design, how do you organise your Photoshop layers,  deliver that mockup, slice the design quickly and write that style guide, well in this chapter Elliot tells us how.

I have yet to read the perfect book. This one had a few things that annoyed me,  there was one instance where I thought the layout of the pages could have been executed in a different manor.  But overall that was a minor point.  Nothing that I would discount the book for.

Sexy Web Design is by in large a good reference book.

Full of little hints and tips that will help  all but crusty old designers like me.  And even then if you have had your eye off the ball  for an instant,  I bet you will still get something out of this book.

Now if you are looking for a Photoshop guide or a CSS design book, this is not for you, this is about design!

So if  you have a design flare, and need to know how to design web sites then this is the book for you.

Rating:

4

Being a freelancer is the new black.  It’s just a crazy fun loving world where nothing can go wrong. Well as a crusty old freelancer I can tell you that’s far from the truth.

Well Miles Burke in his new book The Principles of Successful Freelancing discusses just that.  Miles is no stranger to making the leap into world of freelancing having done it three times.

When I first picked up this book, I’ll be honest, I was a little skeptical.   But I found this is a good book. It’s well written with an entertaining layback style all it’s own.  I can just imagine Miles sitting back in a cafe or coffee shop chatting about freelancing.  You could easily read this book on 4-5 hour plane flight.

This book is squarely aimed at the person who is considering getting into freelancing or has just started. It covers off all aspects of the freelancers life cycle, such as:

• From starting out and a hard look at oneself, are you cut out to be a freelancer.
• Preparing for the transition from regular work to freelancing, and all the things you really need to think about (but don’t).
• Finances, making sure you really do stay in business and keep a positive cash flow.
• Productivity, time tracking, getting into that productivity zone and not being distracted.
• Selling, winning work and understanding how to sell. Something all freelances fear at some stage.
• Customer service, or keeping the client, project management made simple, and dealing with difficult clients.
• Lifestyle, work habits, life balance are discussed, this is huge area that I know freelancers cut corners on.
• Expansion, life beyond freelancing, the final stepping stone on the way for a freelancer, be that back into employment, or expansion using outsourcing or your own staff.

You know what’s really good and annoying too (well for me) with this book; it is just full of all those tips and tricks that I  just wish some freelancing mentor had told me all those years ago in the previous century when I started freelancing.

I enjoyed this book to the point that I found myself nodding and smiling as Miles waxed on with another aspect of freelancing, pointing out the pitfalls along the way.  And sometimes I was wincing as I realised that after 14 years in the game I’ve still got a few things even I can improve on.

The one thing I didn’t like, and this was just me, is it was it had a few too many lists in places. It made me think I was checking off my freelancing skills all the time. But really that was a very minor point.

Overall, highly recommended, if you are a new freelancer,  or old one, or maybe just considering freelancing, get this book, read it.   Act on it, it’s a great reference source, then later on, reread it.

As Miles says:

Freelance life is hard. It can be very hard. Juggling projects with the rest of your life, as well as keeping the finances flowing so you can support yourself and any dependants, is a tricky skill to perfect, and not something everyone can handle.

But you know with this book, it’s now a little bit easier.

Rating:

3.5

Painting the Web by Shelly Powers is not the type of book I would normally pick up.   Having 14 years web design experience means that you tend to have absorbed something in the way of use of graphics on the web, from raster images,  to Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), which is what this book is all about.

Looking at this book from its title alone, I first thought, Painting the Web was a book on SVG.   But I was wrong, well partly wrong. 

Shelly,  takes you through what makes up the graphics on the web now and into the future in a chatty friendly manner, however this book can be a touch dry when it comes to technical explanations.

Raster to Start, Plus a little SVG

It moves through image and colour theory onto a review of professional to budget applications both desktop and online.   The book presents a no nonsense explanation of the software.  It also supplies a few how to recipes on the building of raster graphics for the web.

A good third of the book is dedicated to the use of vector graphics on the web.  Dealing with X3D, VRML (now that brings back memories), VML, SVG (noting it’s restrictive browser implementation).  I was expecting maybe a little discussion on desktop vector applications, but instead there is comprehensive introduction on  SVG.  It’s not just a few pages folks, this goes from the simple to complex examples. There is also a good overview of the SVG tools and editors in the marketplace to round it off.

Web Design Basics

There is a small section looking at CSS.  Now this is not meant to be a  primer, it assumes you know your CSS, and I’ll assume you do. The book looks at the more advanced elements of CSS 2, not bad if you’re not using all the browser compliant elements already.    It runs us through concepts such as pseudo-elements, specificity and styling microformats.  Like with Raster graphics there are a number of CSS recipes as well.

For me this is where the book slips up a little; if we are uber CSS designers then we should know all the basics that she explains such as layered background, conditional statements, font unit resets, unordered list menus.

There is a section on the principles of good design, as well, detailing how to layout a good semantic web page, be that static or via a flexible layout grid.

One small point on the microformats front, a footnote reference to the microformats wiki would have been a nicety, it’s not a biggie, something to consider for the 2nd edition.  There is also no explanation what microformats are and how they are used.  Slap on the wrist to the technical editor.

Lets Go Dynamic

Dynamic Web Page Graphics is also gets a look in.   I was expecting a section on Silverlight, Flash, a little AIR and maybe a some Ajaxian animation.   What the book presents is DHTML (shudder – does anyone still use that term anymore).   This book steps through the DOM and the usual manipulation of the CSS styling moving onto lightbox and accordion functionality  using the  standard unobtrusive Javascript implementation.  Again this is a quick visit into the ajaxian world.

Paint the Canvas

There is a interesting exploration into the realm of the canvas and it’s extension into the use with SVG.  This book explains the creation of simple objects and their comparison to SVG,  to the use of canvas effects and transformations.  The canvas element is one of those under used elements that I can see getting a greater use in the near future.

The section ends with an extensive bringing together of SVG and the canvas with a little Javascript and manipulation of the DOM.  It is the use of this type of animation techniques demonstrated in the book, that make me really question the need for implementation of like functionality in traditional animation rendering platforms like Flash.

Overall

Overall it’s not a bad book, like I said previously, not something I would pick up, but I’m a little jaded on the subject and looking for the edge.  Still the sections on SVG and the canvas where informative.

These sections on SVG and canvas to some may seem to be worthless. Well I have the feeling that we are going to see a greater use of these to with the development of various dynamic canvas libraries as with have with Javascript. This book has just seeded the ground for this with a good primer in the subject. With the increasing compliance of browsers with SVG, it will not be long before this is another standard technique for front end developers..

However, the book could do with the gleam of a good technical editor, there are sections of the book that I was wincing over, not that they are technically wrong. It was just the sequence of the chapters and the information therein, a little too much on digital imagery and photographic aspects for my liking for instance.

This with some of the disjointed sections it tended to give me the impression that the book was all over the place not really knowing what it wanted to be, graphics, CSS, AJAX, SVG, Canvas or design overview; it does it all. A little streamlining and this could have been a better book.

That said if you want a good comprehensive overview on the graphical elements of the web, especially SVG at 600+ pages, Painting the Web, by Shelly Powers is a good place to start.

Side note

There is no way Shelly could have know about Javascript dynamo Dmitry Baranovskiy’s awesome Raphaël JavaScript Library that provides cross browser support for browser generated vector graphics such as SVG. Considering the book was published in April 2008, I sure,  if she had known this would have been included.

Rating:

3.5

I have been playing around with various JavaScript frameworks for a while now, one that has taken my interest of late is JQuery. Hence getting hold of Learning JQuery by Karl Swedberg and Jonathan Chaffer was to be expected. The book is available as a pdf e-book or in print format. I’m old school, I like the print version. Mainly so I can throw a book down in frustration or fall asleep with it and not worry about a laptop crashing to the ground.

The book is a self contained guide to taking a designer with little JavaScript experience (from a designer view point) through a series of tutorials with code samples to understanding JQuery to a reasonable degree. But be warned I would recommend you supplement this book with a good beginner JavaScript book and learn how JavaScript really works and not rely on the framework and library all the time.

It takes you through a brief tour of the DOM, triggers, Manipulation of the DOM, Using Ajax for passing data. There is also a entire chapter on writing JQuery plugins, which does seem a little out of place. However a saving grace is the Appendices that deal with a number of newbie type mistakes that can and do occur with the use of a library of this nature.

Web Standards and the use of unobtrusive development techniques have not been forgotten with this book. It even takes a leaf from Jeremy Keith with some Hijak like methods. This is all good, and I can recall smiling away when I was reading this book over these very points.

However there are a few technical errors in relation to screen readers and their ability to read JavaScript. Also some of the techniques given in the tutorials could be assessed for an improvement in their presented accessibility standards, as in most cases they are not industry best practice.

The book is also a little dry in tone, not to the extent that it is unreadable. But I did find that it was best studied from in limited periods. Layout wise the book is reasonable, a minor point: more white space around the code examples would have helped the clarity of the examples.

Learning JQuery is reasonable book for a designer to learn JQuery from. If you know your usability and accessibility (and you should) then you will find some minor errors, but you can easily get around these.

Rating:

4

The book has been out a while. I did first read Mobile Web Design by Cameron Moll a while back via an pdf e-book version on a plane flight. The book is short to the point and very much suited to the electronic media format, with all the links activated when they are referenced, which you would expect.

First off this is not a book that you teach yourself how to code for the mobile web directly step by step. However it is a beginners guide to the mobile web as it stands today (circa 2007). This book is rather a reference guide on where to find the relevant information on mobile web development and the issues that you will face.

Cameron presents in a somewhat chatty and personalised style a web standards based view on mobile design and the problems that we face. He covers topics from an overview of CSS/XHTML implementation in the mobile arena, testing and validation to the alternative platforms such as Flash Lite, use of Ajax and Java ME.

Cameron’s refined style of conversation is engaging to the point that on many an occasion I was hoping he was going to explain a topic in detail and not shunt us off to a web reference. That said the book is short at just over 100 pages and does cover a board topic range, and it’s a starting point for a board topic so this can be forgiven.

The only thing that does detract from the print version verses the e-book is that the pdf is in full colour, where as the print version is in black and white. Clearly the book was written and designed with screen reading in mind (which is good). However some of the reference tables in the print version where a little hard to read for me personally, no problem in the pdf version as you can zoom in on the tables.

Overall good read, if you are looking at design for the mobile web this is a good place to start.

Rating:

4

I first heard of this book (The Art and Science of CSS) via Twitter when Jina Bolton was getting all excited about the first press copies in March 2007. Also having Andrew Krespanis as the Technical Editor, I know it would be good, as least technically. Like a lot of books these days this book is broken up into several chapters with separate sections written by each of the authors Cameron Adams, Jina Bolton, David Johnson, Steve Smith and Jonathan Snook.

From the general blurb on the cover I would say that this book is aimed at web designers that consider standards based design to be boring and uninteresting. Well that writes me out the demographic to start with. So is this book worth looking at if you are familiar with CSS? This really does depend on your level of understanding of current techniques. Most of the methods that presented in detail with this book can be found out on the web in various places. If you have been reading the right blogs and the attending the right conferences then you will know most of the information presented in this book. However if you weren’t in that zone and can not instantly pull the latest and greatest from your CSS, then this book is for you.

In no time flat it explains a fair number of leading edge CSS techniques with a ever present degree of good humour and readability. In fact this is not the usual boring dry technical manual. As usual Kevin Yank and the team at Sitepoint have produced a entertaining book that both acts as a step-by-step guide, and an adhoc manual for transforming the dull styling of CSS layouts into pages of design beauty.

The chapters of the book breakdown the CSS design process into function design and content types such as:

• Headings

  Good chapter covers the basics of headings for design, general image replacement methods and use of sIFR.

• Images

  This is basically all about styling images, and bringing in contextual content for images and styling that with use of minimum semantic markup.

• Backgrounds

  Looks at the use of layering backgrounds and using the positioning layout points to your advantage. It also deals with the future direction of CSS3. Which elements of I want now, and really just can’t wait for these browser manufacturers to get it together and implement the CSS3 draft.

• Navigation

  There is a little overlap here between navigation and the background chapter. No overlap is wrong its more extension of the theme and technique. That said there are some very interesting ideas on navigation elements and their presentation in this chapter beyond the sprites method.

• Forms

  Forms always seem to be the web designers and developers bane. But this chapter does present some simple solutions and general directions for the rendering of forms beyond the usual presentation methods. Good discussion on the correct way to do error messages in forms. More designers and developers should take note of this method.

• Rounded Corners

  Now this was the chapter, that I should have know about, so this is the one that I personally think opening my eyes a little more. Like you always get told, you can’t know everything.

• Tables

  So we are not using them for layout, but for tabular data. But still it doesn’t have to be boring does it. This is a good discussion on the use of filters (non standard, I know) and layering of backgrounds via the parent child aspect of the markup. One disappointment is the obtrusive use of a JavaScript in one example. But that can be forgiven, its not a JavaScript book is it. I would have used JQuery and placed it in unobtrusively anyway.

Would I recommend this book? Yes if you are not within the leading edge of the Web Industry, or you are even a little bit unsure about your CSS skills being totally up to date, or you just want to have a different take on design and break out of the CSS box mode; then this is the book for you, . I even didn’t have a problem with the layout or the typography of this book, good read, full of useful information and techniques.