In recent years a wide number of excellent books regarding web design (be it directly or indirectly) have been published and they cover a wide range of topics. In this article I take a look at some of the books I’ve bought and highlight what each is about and who might find them useful.

I’ve bought a number of web design books in the last 2 years. I consider them all to be books worth having for a web designer, but each tends to focus on different areas and more careful consideration of which to invest in may be required for those on a budget. This article will briefly cover some of the ones I have at the time of writing (I am aware that there are some conspicuous absences but I’ve been on a budget too!).

• Web Standards Solutions (Dan Cederholm)
• The Zen of CSS Design (Dave Shea and Molly Holzschlag)
• Stylin’ With CSS (Charles Wyke-Smith)
• Bulletproof Web Design (Dan Cederholm)
• DOM Scripting (Jeremy Keith)
• CSS Mastery (Andy Budd, Cameron Moll, Simon Collison)
• Transcending CSS (Andy Clarke)

• Thinking With Type (Ellen Lupton)

  I won’t go into all the contents for each books since they tend to cover a huge range of topics, instead I’ll focus on the parts of each book that have me reaching for them to help solve particular problems.

  Web Standard Solutions

  The first web design book I bought (aside from a beginners guide to HTML 4 about 10 years ago which is rather outdated) and a good purchase. I’d say it’s mainly aimed at people who are already interested in CSS but don’t have too much experience using it to create designs. If you’re already an experienced developer one of the more advanced books would probably be a more important purchase. Content highlights include:

• Semantic use of basically all HTML tags
• The Cascade, minimizing unnecessary divs, spans, ids and classes
• Layout techniques
• Image Replacement

• Print styles

  The Zen of CSS Design

  I bought this at the same time as Web Standards Solutions and became my immediate favourite for just flicking through and reading occasional content. Coming from a technical background I personally find having a book as inspirational as this invaluable. In my experience good design is much harder than any HTML or CSS, but this book manages to cover both the technical and the creative in the same space. A must-have for any web designer regardless of experience. Highlights:

• Full of inspirational designs
• Thorough breakdowns of how specific design effects can be achieved using CSS
• Introduction to use of shape, colour and typography in web design

• Clear demonstration of how a design can be fundamentally changed using just CSS and no mark-up changes

  Stylin’ With CSS

  This book came to my attention when Jeffrey Zeldman mentioned it on his site, but I have to admit I’ve not used it much. The book is effectively an in-depth tutorial to just about every aspect of CSS and for this it is excellent, but I personally found the examples a little unattractive despite being in colour. This book would be useful for someone who needs a good paper guide to CSS though it doesn’t cover advanced techniques to the same extent as other books.

• Guide to the majority of CSS attributes
• Child, Sibling and Attribute selectors
• The Cascade

• Layout techniques

  Bulletproof Web Design

  Dan Cederholm returns to write a follow-up to Web Standards Solutions, but this time in full colour. Having got the basics out of the way in the last book, Bulletproof Web Design focuses on how to create designs that are robust and flexible as well as having the ability to degrade gracefully if certain browser features are missing or disabled. This book is invaluable as a reference material, it’s also pretty nice to look at. Highlights are:

• Attractive colour examples
• Dealing with problems associated with using floats for layout
• Rounded corners techniques
• Handling user-controlled text size
• Handling situations when images are missing or disabled
• Advanced use of floats (particularly useful for search or product listing pages)
• Accessibility Tools

• Fluid Layouts

  DOM Scripting

  The only book I currently have about JavaScript, DOM Scripting is a nice introduction to effective use of JavaScript to manipulate the Document-Object-Model. I found this book to be an interesting read but so far I haven’t really put the principles into practice yet (whilst I don’t have a problem with JavaScript in principle I try to avoid it unless I can really justify it). This book will be useful for somebody looking to get starting with JavaScript, particularly those interested in unobtrusive scripting (treating scripting as an enhancement rather than a requirement).

• Introduction to JavaScript
• Unobtrusive scripting
• Progressive Enhancement
• Manipulating the DOM
• Basic animation with JavaScript

• Introduction to AJAX

  CSS Mastery

  This is a very useful book and I’d say the main reason to get it is that it covers the same techniques as other CSS books but also fills in a lot of the gaps. Whilst I haven’t checked too closely, this seems like the only book I have that explains how vertical margins actually work. It’s only in black-and-white and not as inspirational as some of the other books, but the technical content and examples more than make up for this.

• Covers basically everything about CSS that the other books cover
• Dealing with browser bugs

• Vertical Margins

  Transcending CSS

  Around June last year I was getting a bit tired of the current stock of web design books, with the exception of The Zen of CSS Design they all seemed focused on the technical side of how to achieve layout effects. There were comparatively few web design books that actually focused on designing websites as opposed to writing HTML and CSS. Transcending CSS is about design, it covers the major design principles and to be honest you don’t even have to be able to read to get a lot out of this book. The book is absolutely packed with inspirational imagery and beautiful examples of techniques. Some aspects of the book might be considered controversial but to be honest I was spending too much time looking at the pretty pictures to be outraged.

• Full of beautiful and inspiring imagery
• Covers source of inspiration for web design
• Very clear explanations of semantics applied to the web
• Full of examples of grids, colour and typography for the web
• Prototyping

• Use of advanced CSS2 and new CSS3 features to achieve new effects

  Thinking With Type

  First things first, this is not a web design book (though it does mention web design from time-to-time). Thinking With Type is an introduction to typography and is both an interesting read and an excellent reference material. The book explains the anatomy of typefaces as well as how to use them in design. Interestingly my favourite part of the book is the appendices, there’s so much useful information about writing style, punctuation and editing that the appendices are worth the expense of the book on their own. Invaluable for anyone who’s vaguely interested in typography.

• Excellent introduction to typefaces and families
• Use of type as a design tool
• Anatomy of typefaces
• Text formatting, spacing and paragraphs
• Use of grids

• Excellent appendices covering proofing, editing, punctuation marks and plenty more

  That’s the end of the list for now, hopefully some of this will be useful to somebody