Jennifer Niederst : Web Design in a Nutshell : A Desktop Quick Reference

Web Design in a Nutshell contains the nitty-gritty on everything you need toknow to design Web pages. It's the good stuff, without the fluff, written andorganized so that answers can be found quickly. Written by veteran Web designerJennifer Niederst, this book provides quick access to the wide range of front-endtechnologies and techniques from which Web designers and authors must draw.

It is an excellent reference for HTML 4.0 tags (including tables, frames, andCascading Style Sheets) with special attention given to browser support and platformidiosyncrasies. The HTML section is more than a reference work, though. It detailsstrange behavior in tables, for instance, and gives ideas and workarounds for usingtables and frames on your site. Web Design in a Nutshell also coversmultimedia and interactivity, audio and video, and emerging technologies like DynamicHTML, XML, embedded fonts, and internationalization.

The book includes:

Discussions of the Web environment, monitors, and browsers
A complete reference to HTML and Server Side Includes, including browsersupport for every tag and attribute
Chapters on creating GIF, JPEG and PNG graphics, including designing with theWeb Palette
Information on multimedia and interactivity, including audio, video, Flash,Shockwave, and JavaScript
Detailed tutorial and reference on Cascading Style Sheets, including anappendix of browser compatibility information
Appendices detailing HTML tags, attributes, deprecated tags, proprietary tags,and CSS compatibility

Amazon.com Review
Are you a print designer working on the Web? An HTML coder learning about server-side hosting for the first time? Web Design in a Nutshell has slim but whole chapters for those topics-- and everything else you can imagine.

Written in the popular "Nutshell" format, this guide is full of helpful tables and lists, making it a perfect desktop reference. The book breaks down the huge topic of Web site development into understandable, readable segments: the Web environment (browsers, displays, design principles), an in-depth guide to HTML tags, graphics manipulation and display, multimedia possibilities, and technologies for larger site management (such as Cascading Style Sheets [CSS] and XML).

While this book is certainly comprehensive, the abundance of information could be overwhelming to someone just starting out with HTML. In addition, the heart of this book is filled with technical specificity on Web page creation (for example, a section under "Graphics" is titled "GIF87a versus GIF89a"). Readers looking for more conceptual explanations of Web design and layout would be better served with other titles. But for day-to-day development and maintenance, Web Design in a Nutshell is a truly well-constructed toolkit.