Feb 21, 2008 | Filed in: Books, Reviews, Web Design, Web Development
Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model
Author: Jeremy Keith
Publisher: Friends of ED
Since I started observing web standards and trying to produce websites that were accessible to the widest possible audience I’ve tried to avoid JavaScript assuming my sites wouldn’t be accessibly to those users with screen readers or JavaScript turned off.
Jeremy Keith, from Brighton’s web consultancy Clearleft, explains how to write good, clean code that degrades gracefully in this fantastic book. Starting at the beginning with the history and basics of JavaScript, he steers you comfortably through best practices and real world, useful examples. Whatever your technical ability you can soon become proficient with writing your own JavaScript and you’ll soon be ready for his next book - Bulletproof Ajax (review coming soon - I’m still reading it!)
Buy DOM Scripting at Amazon.co.uk
Buy DOM Scripting at Amazon.com
Jan 20, 2008 | Filed in: News & Events, Reviews, Web Design
Mike Armstrong, one of our talented designers at Bluestone, has finally got round to getting his personal site up and running. When he’s not working, playing Xbox games or watching dodgy B-movies, he’s scribbling away creating characters and illustrating comics. The Catalyst Studios site will showcase his work and his thoughts in what promises to become a popular blog.
www.catalyststudios.co.uk
Made up of scribbles and scraps of paper it’s a great design that has a real feel of an artist’s website. The design has been ported into a Wordpress theme and demonstrates his excellent CSS skills - I’m privileged to have him in my team.
Sep 15, 2007 | Filed in: Books, CSS, Reviews, Web Design
Author: Andy Budd, Simon Collison & Cameron Moll.
Publisher: Friends of Ed.
I had originally thumbed through this book, subtitled “Advanced Web Standard Solutions” in my local bookstore and shrugged it off as covering pretty much most of what I’d already digested from other popular CSS books. It wasn’t until a friend showed me some cool techniques from the book that I properly read though it and regretted not buying it sooner!
Though it’s aimed at the intermediate web designer, it is well written and I would certainly recommend this as an essential buy for all web designers. The book begins with Clear:Left’s Andy Budd provides most of the content starting with a chapter about well-structured and meaningful mark-up. It’s these best practices that will help catapult you into the realms of CSS Master! It then recaps on the box model, positioning and floats, making it easy for a beginner to pick up this book and run with it, before moving into the techniques, with clear and concise examples, including a couple of good chapters on bugs and hacks.
The final two chapters are where Simon Collison & Cameron Moll step in to demonstrate these examples in two real-world showcase websites. This book is absolutely the best book currently on offer for CSS web design.
Buy CSS Mastery at amazon.co.uk
Buy CSS Mastery at amazon.com
