Customer Reviews

Head First Web Design

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

As a member of its target audience, I found this to be a tremendous book. It's perfect for web developers who know (X)HTML and CSS but are clueless when it comes to the design process itself. The only thing to beware of is the large number of errors that should have been caught in the editing process.

I do a decent amount of PHP/MySQL and Javascript/AJAX work, so I have to already know how HTML & CSS operate. I don't need to be told what a div element is, or what a style declaration looks like. I am the least creative person on the planet, though, and this book feels like it was written specifically for me. I can't think of higher praise than that. It takes you through the process of building a site - not just what a good webpage looks like, but how a whole site is structured and fits together and ways to make that come alive through design. I never felt confused, but never felt like the authors were moving too slowly, either.

This is my third book by Head First (I also have the HTML and AJAX books), so I already knew that I liked the Head First writing style - perhaps a little light on technical side, but the lessons get driven home. The reader simply retains material from these books, and that is tough to find in most technical books on the market.

Again, the only thing to watch out for is the sloppy editing; there were a few too many editing errors for my taste. I still gave the book five stars, though, because it was just that good.

Head First Web Design is a invaluable tool in planning and building web sites and follows the excellent pedagogical principles of other books
in the Head First series. It is also unique in teaching the entire life cycle of building a usable, information-rich, beautiful, navigable, and accessible web site, and not being confined to illustrating the graphical layout of beautiful web pages. It illustrates, the sketching, information design, navigation, and customer interaction issues involved in developing a sophisticated, content-filled web site and prepares the developer to perform a well-managed design and implementation process. The guide does assume that the prospective web designer have familiarity with HTML, XHTML, and CSS, but that is an entirely reasonable assumption for any web designer and is well served by the HTML/XHTML volume in the Head First Series. This is an excellent and most necessary book for the design of sophisticated information architectures, and usable beautiful web sites that serve both the user and the organization that commissioned them.
--Ira Laefsky

Don't let the cover deter you... there's a wealth of knowledge beneath it. As a somewhat practiced web-developer, I found this book to be quite a fresh and at times rather humorous approach to a subject many of us tend to marginalize in our work: the design process. From devising color schemes to navigation and content hierarchies, the book covers a lot ground and contains some pretty good exercises (though none too technical) for both novice and experienced web designers/developers. Naturally, it does a great job of illustrating how implementing good design practices in your work will translate into (and improve) your coding. I particularly found the chapter on Accessibility to be rather useful, as it is another thing a lot of us tend to forget about when creating websites...On that count, I am guilty as charged.

as a beginner new to web design, html, etc., and having just finished head start's html and css with xhtml and finding it to be very well organized, informative and a great introduction to learning css, i was looking forward to head start's web design book as a logical next step to building my knowledge of web design. as Angela Tate stated in her review, "there is little within the Head First Web Design to justify its nearly 500 pages." i am halfway through the book and would have to agree. i am so frustrated that i've come so far in the book and feel like maybe i've learned 5-7 tid bits of information that i could keep on mini post it notes. the excerises also feel rather contrived. you find yourself asking, is it necessary to actually do this and what am i going to get out of it? it's feels more like information was created to fill a need for exerices, or a side note space had to be filled so a side not was written. structure drove the content, rather than the content driving structure. i didn't feel that way about the exercises or any of the information in the previous book...

Pros: Easy read. Helpful methodologies. Good references.

I have to admit that I found the format of this book interesting. The writers' tried to inject a lot of character, color and some lightheartedness into something that can become very dry reading. Some aspects becoming tiring after a while, but an overall good job. There are some good strategies here. The books delivers good pointers on how to handle information architecture, lay out a web page and color theory. I also appreciated that the book was sprinkled with links to great online resources for site designers and ideas on how to moved forward once you've read the book.

Cons: Needs more meat

This book is great for folks needing to build simple web sites. That being said, I wish it could have touched a little more on the back-end, server side of developing a web site. It did touch on how to build a blog, but I would have like more discussion on database technologies and how to build an application.

Still a nice job and a learned a few things.

I have a feeling that the other reviews of this book were posted by employees of O'Reilly.
The chapters are disorganized, the writing confusing, and the code buggy. The authors are often confused on the meaning of design terms. For example, chapter 2 introduces the concept of a visual metaphor, but the authors explain it as the use of color and design elements. They don't seem to be aware of the fact that a metaphor is a comparison between two things to help comprehension, like using a tab shape for navigation links. Tab navigation is another concept that they got wrong. They assign the term "tabbed-naviagtion" to any sort of horizontal navigation. They don't seem to understand that for that metaphor to work, it actually has to look like a tab.
The download files for the tutorials are already complete, making it harder to follow along in the book. Many of the pen and paper exercises are not thought out, like on page 209 when they ask you to draw navigation on a black masthead. The answers to the exercises are often frustrating, like when they ask you to rename categories and then the answer on the next page says the category names were good like they were.
I could go on for days about how poorly put together this book is, but I'll leave it at that.

Head First brought us another a masterpiece in the usual brain-friendly way. After studying this book you'll 'master' pre-production, information architecture, navigation, color, and even accessibility.

WHO IS THIS BOOK FOR? If you can answer 'YES' to all of these;
1) you're comfortable with XHTML & CSS but don't have experience with web design.
2) do you consider yourself a web developer (PHP, Ruby on Rails, .NET) and want to become a better web designer?
3) do you need to understand web design for a course or your line of work?

TABLE OF CONTENTS (in brakets are my comments)
1 Building Beautiful Web Pages (know your audience, design for your users)
2 Pre-Production (start with paper, pencil, and a big fat pink eraser)
3 Organize Your Site
4 Layout and Design (some golden rules incl the Golden Ratio)
5 Desinging With Color (the color wheel & more ... excellent!)
6 Smart Navigation
7 Writing For The Web (...is different!)
8 Accesibility
9 Listen to Your Users
10 Evolutionary Design (keeping your site fresh/design updated)
11 The Business of Web Design (great basic stuff for those turning 'pro')

I am learning to build websites on my own, and these books are the only ones that explain complex concepts in a visual format that is appealing to a graphic designer.

Overall this book gave good advice. It was centered in design principles you'll have in a systems design course and adopts many of the same principles that are in design books. Easily explained, assumes you already have knowledge of xhtml, css, javascript although none are required to understand content.

I gave this book 5 stars because of the many aspects for web design it offers. It gives you some ideas on the actual design process and how to organize and clarify the site. Well written and enjoyable to read, it goes beyond a boring how to book. I checked it out of the library twice before I purchased it. If you want to learn to get past a standard form web deign this book is for you. I found it fun and motivating as well. Enjoy. Jnetti