Customer Reviews

250 HTML and Web Design Secrets

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I'm always hungry for new knowledge as a web designer, looking for that one trick to make my site either faster, easier to understand, accessible, and better. Sure, you could scour the web for weeks, looking for all the little tips and tricks that makes a good website great, or you can get this book and discover it all easily. All from a person who has, for many years, made the web a better place.

Molly's attention to detail, her teaching methods, and approach to giving these secrets and tips makes is utterly easy to digest and remember. By all means, this book is a treasure trove of knowledge that belongs in every web designer's personal collection.

If you have already used HTML to make some web pages, then this book might be of value. That is, if you plan on adding more pages or perhaps you want to maintain the website hosting these pages? The book talks about how to handle this next level of complexity. The author does not bog you down in the fine details of HTML syntax. Instead, she gives many suggestions ["secrets"] on making a logical arrangement of content. Like giving simple, intuitive names to the directory hierarchy and files. So that users can traverse your website easily.

Typically, most of the suggestions are of this style. The payoff is often easier long term maintenance. Like her ideas on effectively using CSS and XHTML. Again, like with HTML itself, you need some minimal prior acquaintance with these packages, to take advantage of this book.

Great book!
Very complete overview and many snippets of experience.
I only called it "in the Rough" because of the paper & binding... it isn't shiney, and no color prints, but the info is the Diamond, and worth much more. As they say, "Don't judge a book by its cover"!
Molly's books are always worth keeping. She delivers. =)

Cal

This is one of the few web books that has great breadth and gives sufficient depth to help not only the novice, but a seasoned web developer. This book has been quite helpful for the web team I am on to understand what current best practices are and how we get to this level.

There are so many poorly developed sites on the web it is great to have a book at hand to point to when needing to explain how to do it right. Molly's book is one of the quickest ways to start building web sites right

To be certain there are some invaluable hints in this book. But since the items covered are just spots of information from here and there around the landscape of web and design standards you need to check this book out in person to make sure you are getting your moneys worth. In particular I liked the material on CSS layout, but I was disappointed with coverage of basic topics like web safe colors, which requires a more in-depth discussion than the few paragraphs presented. Worth the look, but be sure to look before you buy.

I skipped over the first chapter because obviously the tools of 2004 are much different than the tools of 2011. I first skim over the content and read only what I believe is relevant to today's web design. Although some of it is obviously common sense for any web designer even a beginner. I am still in college and am doing web design on the side and found some of this stuff very helpful. There is a lot of strategic planning and good tips in here that still apply. For 4$ including shipping you really can't go wrong. I am sending this to a colleague that will do some work for me part time as well. Highlighted and underlined the important stuff which I believe was about 60% of the book. 60% of a 2004 book I believe is still a very good percentage of good material. I would recommend this to anyone that wants a helpful cheap book for web design. There are some helpful html tips too in here.

So the just of it,
Cons,
Quite a bit dated.
Some common sense tips.
Advanced designers wont get too much out of it.

Pros,
Great book at a great value.
Some concepts and tips still pertain to today's web design.
VERY CHEAP, I would buy this book again for 4$.
Good for beginners and intermediate web designers.

PS. I should be saying experienced rather than advanced.

I was slightly disappointed as the material is rather brief in coverage. I was looking more for a how too with examples. It does cover a large range of topics and has good reference for things to do but thin on how to do them.
But under $10 bucks is still worth the price.

This book is ok and has a few decent tips in it, but for the most part there isn't anything in here that you couldn't find with a few minutes and Google. I keep it on my desk with a couple pages marked but that's really about it.