One of the Nutshell series of technical books, this 562-page book focuses on what is known as front end web design, the presentation aspects of a web site. It's twenty-seven chapters (in five parts) do a good job of describing the internet environment, HTML techniques, and the use of graphics and multimedia. It also introduces some of the emerging web-design technolgies.
The book uses a somewhat informal, discussion-oriented style of presentation to provide comprehensive information about the design of web pages. It's strength is it's focus on practical issues, beginning with a discussion of differences between web browsers.
The book's approach, generally, is to begin with an overview and then work its way down to the particulars. After an introductory chapter, it begins with a practical discussion of issues such as display monitor resolutions, color issues, and accessibility. Each topic is discussed methodically and its coverage is comprehensive.
The third chapter is interesting: it discusses web design principles for those who have previously designed for print. Ever practical and detailed, it even describes the differences in image resolutions and gamma settings.
The second part of the book focuses on HTML and its applications in web design. Although the book is not a complete reference to HTML tags, it does include all the basics. And it reproduces the complete set of color names and their numeric values; a handy reference. It also includes a table of special characters, the character entities not found in the normal alphanumeric character set.
The third part of the book centers on graphics issues and includes topics such as interlacing, transparency, anti-aliasing, dithering, and optimizing. The fourth part of the book continues the discussion of graphics with a focus on multimedia and interactivity.
The fifth, and final, part of the book provides an interesting discussion of emerging technologies such as cascading style sheets and the purpose and value of DHML and XML.
The strength of this book is its comprehensive coverage of the topic and its useful resources. It would be a useful tool in the web designer's arsenal.
