Learning Web Design: A Beginner's Guide to HTML, Graphics, and Beyond [Paperback]

Jennifer Niederst Robbins (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 2, 2003 | ISBN-10: 0596004842 | ISBN-13: 978-0596004842 | Edition: Second Edition

In Learning Web Design, author Jennifer Niederst shares the knowledge she's gained from years of web design experience, both as a designer and a teacher. This book starts from the beginning-- defining the Internet, the Web, browsers, and URLs -- so you don't need to have any previous knowledge about how the Web works. After reading this book, you'll have a solid foundation in HTML, graphics, and design principles that you can immediately put to use in creating effective web pages.

In the second edition, Jennifer has updated the book to cover style sheets and reflect current web standards. She has also added exercises that help you to learn various techniques and short quizzes that make sure you're up to speed with key concepts. The companion CD-ROM contains material for all the exercises in the book, as well as trial versions of Fireworks® MX, and HomeSite™ 5; Adobe ® Photoshop® 7, ImageReady® 7, and BBEdit 7.

Learning Web Design, 2nd Edition:

• Covers the nuts and bolts of basic HTML and style sheets, with detailed examples of formatting text, adding graphic elements, making links, creating tables and frames, and using color on the Web.


• Explains whether to use GIFs or JPEGs for different types of images, and includes important tips on optimizing graphics for web delivery.
• Provides dozens of web design do and don'ts, to help you make good web design decisions and avoid common beginner traps.
• Contains hands-on exercises throughout the book that allow you to try out new techniques along the way.

Unlike other beginner books, Learning Web Design leaves no holes in your education. It gives you everything you need to create basic web sites and will prepare you for more advanced web work. If you are interested in web design, this book is the place to start. After finishing it, you'll be ready for the author's bestselling companion reference, Web Design in a Nutshell.

Fireworks and HomeSite are trademarks or registered trademarks of Macromedia, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Adobe, ImageReady, and Photoshop are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"I do like this book. I liked the first edition, and I liked the author's other books. They are models of what textbooks should be: clear, concise, nice to look at, useful and correct. ... If you know someone who wants to get started with designing websites and wants to progress quickly and reasonable far, this title is definitely for them. Get people who design bad websites to read it to, we can hope." - Lindsay Marshall, news@UK, December 2003

About the Author

Jennifer Niederst Robbins was one of the first designers for the Web. As the designer of O'Reilly's Global Network Navigator (GNN), the first commercial web site, she has been designing for the Web since 1993. Since then, she has worked as the creative director of Songline Studios (a former subsidiary of O'Reilly) and as a freelance designer and consultant since 1996. She is the author of the bestselling Web Design in a Nutshell and Learning Web Design (O'Reilly), and she has taught web design at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and Johnson and Wales University in Providence. She has spoken at major design and Internet events including SXSW Interactive, Seybold Seminars, the GRAFILL conference (Geilo, Norway), and one of the first W3C International Expos.

In addition to designing, Jennifer enjoys cooking, travel, indie-rock, and making stuff. She maintains her own professional web site at http://www.littlechair.com as well.

Product Details

• Paperback: 496 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; Second Edition edition (July 2, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596004842
• ISBN-13: 978-0596004842
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #389,110 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

80 of 80 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THE beginner's guide, September 7, 2001

By 

John S. Ryan "Scott Ryan" (Cuyahoga Falls, OH) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Learning Web Design : A Beginner's Guide to HTML, Graphics, and Beyond (Paperback)

Jennifer Niederst is just the person you want to write a book like this. Many readers of this page will already know who she is, but since this book is aimed at absolute beginners a short introduction may be in order.

Originally a graphic designer, in 1993 Niederst became one of the very first web designers when she worked on the world's first commercial website (O'Reilly & Associates' Global Network Navigator, which is no longer in publication but you can see samples of it on Niederst's own website if you want; write me for the URL). Since then she's been one of the best-known web designers around and she's written other books on the topic -- notably _Web Design in a Nutshell_, which I highly recommend you get as a followup to this one (but wait for the new second edition, due out in October 2001). Since Al Gore didn't even _invent_ the Internet until 1993, that makes Niederst the nearest thing there is to an "old-timer" in what is, after all, a pretty new profession.

Niederst has said in interviews that this book is the one she wished she'd had to give her web-design students. It won't take you long to see why; it's painstakingly thorough and detailed, just the ticket for somebody who has never written a speck of HTML code before and is a little fuzzy on just what this "Internet" thing is.

But it's also helpful to people at other stages of knowledge. The coverage (mostly HTML and graphics, with a little bit of appetite-whetting overview at the end about more advanced techniques like cascading style sheets, JavaScript, and XML) is so complete that if, like me, you learned this stuff on your own, it will fill in _lots_ of gaps in your education. (Over the last year or two I've gotten pretty proficient with text but I knew almost zilch about graphics until I read this book.) And even if you already know all this stuff cold, this book will probably still be handy as a reference and a source of helpful advice.

Then, too, it's also a handy rough-and-ready guide to the sorts of application software you might want to acquire if you're getting seriously into web design. Niederst not only introduces the major players among authoring tools and graphics packages, but steps through her examples more than once to show you how they work in, e.g., Dreamweaver and GoLive.

The style is breezy and chatty but with no loss of accuracy. You'll find out why Niederst thinks "web design is cool" and you'll learn some of "Jen's pet peeves" (e.g. spinning-globe graphics and rainbow bars), but you'll also get a thorough and accessible introduction to the nuts and bolts of web design.

If you're just getting started on the creation of web pages, this is the book to use first. As I noted above, you'll probably also want to get Niederst's _Nutshell_ book as a sequel. After that, you'll be well qualified to decide what else you need.

54 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars will help me teach, April 5, 2001

By 

Arnold Kling (Silver Spring, Md USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Learning Web Design : A Beginner's Guide to HTML, Graphics, and Beyond (Paperback)

I bought this book because I may be teaching a course in web design in a high school this fall. I want to cover HTML, web graphics, CSS, and JavaScript.

Niederst covers HTML and graphics in depth. With HTML, she teaches how to create a page, how to format text, how to insert graphics, how to create links, etc. The graphics section may be the strongest in the whole book. It is exactly what I was looking for as a resource to explain how graphics are edited for the Web. CSS and JavaScript get only passing attention, but that is probably to be expected.

There are a few "modern" tricks that are missing from the book. There is no discussion of the .PNG standard for web graphics. There is no discussion of the "link title" tag, which can create a rollover effect with just an HTML tag.

Niederst also spends some time on the basics of obtaining server space and putting files onto a server. I think that this is very important, because this can be the most confusing part about getting started in Web design, and other books generally omit it.

I can give this book my strongest recommendation to other teachers of web design courses. I am sure that I will refer back to it constantly.

For students, I'm afraid that it might be too broad, and for beginners my guess is that it would be too overwhelming. For example, on p.10-11 in discussing what software you need to buy, Niederst lists 3 web authoring tools, 2 text editors, and 5 graphics tools. Nowhere does she make it clear that you do not need all 10! As an experienced web designer, I know that it would be silly to work with Dreamweaver(tm) and Frontpage(tm) at the same time. But that may not be obvious to a beginner. Nor would it be obvious that if you choose an authoring tool you would not use a text editor.

This breadth of information runs throughout the book. I would think that a beginner would be better off starting with a shorter book that teaches a single approach to page construction, rather than a book that tries to cover multiple approaches at once.

31 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great intro for fledgling Web designers, August 14, 2001

By 

Andrew B. King (Ann Arbor, MI United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Learning Web Design : A Beginner's Guide to HTML, Graphics, and Beyond (Paperback)

What does it take to become a Web designer? Find out from Jennifer Niederst, one of the most experienced Web designers around. She's been designing commercial sites since 1993! Aimed squarely at beginners, the book assumes no previous knowledge of the Internet and guides you through each of the key components of conventional Web design.

The book is the cornerstone of O'Reilly's Web Studio Series of books created for newcomers to the world of the Web design. One upcoming book in the series is "Designing with JavaScript" by Nick Heinle (our former JavaScript columnist). Jennifer calls this a "prequel" to her Web Design in a Nutshell book of the same publisher. Jennifer says:

"I wrote Web Design in a Nutshell because it was the book I needed as a professional Web designer. Learning Web Design is the book I wished I had to give out as a coursebook to my classes on beginning Web design."

Part I takes you through what Web design skills you need (information architecture, interface design, graphics, HTML, JavaScript etc.), how the Web works, FTP, Web vs. print design, and the design process. Part II teaches you basic HTML and color, and III covers creating and optimizing common Web graphics formats (GIF, JPEG, & GIF89a). Part IV "Form and Function" fuses these fundamentals together to create more "advanced" techniques like fancy bulleted lists, vertical rules, sliced images, and pop-up windows.

My favorite parts of the book were the later chapters. Part IV continues with a short usability chapter that has some good advise for first-timers (site structure, metaphors, navigation design [breadcrumbs, toolbars, etc.]). Chapter 19 has some Web design dos and don'ts like keeping file sizes small, above the fold advice, chunking, fluid design, etc. The final chapter "How'd They Do That: An Introduction to Advanced Techniques" briefly covers forms, audio/video, CSS, JavaScript/DHTML, and Flash.

There's nothing here experience developers haven't seen before, but this is one of the few books that you can hand to beginning Web designers and be confident they'll be on the right track.

I have two minor quibbles with the book. The author keeps referring to style sheets, but gives them little coverage in the last chapter. Jennifer says that based on her years of teaching beginners aren't ready for CSS yet, and can barely handle HTML:

"I've gotten similar comments about the lack of CSS in the book. It was a tough decision where to cut the line for "beginners," especially since I am so pro-standards (style separate from content and all that) myself.

But in the end, it came down to audience. I based the decision on my experience teaching beginning web design courses. The people who sign up for my classes (the same people who might buy this beginners book) are NOT ready to handle style sheets. They think that Netscape owns the Internet. Even simple HTML tagging is fairly overwhelming to them. And frankly, for the types of sites they are trying to learn to make (personal sites, small organization sites, etc.), creating standard-compliant code with style information in CSS is overkill. They just want an overview of how to make sites. I teach them practical techniques that work today but make reference to style sheets as a more robust and "proper" way to go. I also provide pointers on where they can learn more about CSS on their own.

Keep in mind that the book is intended as an introduction (albeit a darn thorough one) to Web design for absolute beginners. The professional set will get a lot more out of Web Design in a Nutshell which covers CSS more thoroughly."

So I can see now why she emphasizes tables. My other quibble is in a minor technical error in the GIF compression/optimization section. The author says "GIF compression works by condensing rows of identical pixel colors." This is not technically correct, LZW works by condensing rows of identical pixel *patterns,* which would include identical colors. Jennifer says this is intended to be "a layman's description of LZW compression" as she's done in her past books.

Other than these two minor quibbles the book is a great introduction for fledgling Web designers. From WebReference.com.