Web Menus with Beauty and Brains (With CD-ROM)

Rating:
Summary: Okay as a design book
Review: Given the various ways menus are presented on the web - via JavaScript, DHTML, CSS, image maps, site indexes, Flash, etc., - MENUS were what I expected the book to be about.

Despite its ill-chosen title, this is a beginning-to-intermediate design book that covers a variety of topics at a somewhat basic level. There's not a lot of hands-on advice for how to determine you menu structures, design the menu's presentation, or how to select among the various techniques available. Disappointing.

Rating:
Summary: Promises unkept
Review: I started to read this book with high hopes. I finished it feeling that I was still at the beginning. There was no follow through on the concepts. I did not learn much about how to implement various types of menus, nor on the fundementals of the underlying code and concepts to get me going on my own. With the exception of her discussion on CSS, which I feel is the only redeeming feature of the book (and why I gave it threes stars instead of two), I feel like I was listening to someone talk around the topic, rather than get to the heart of the matter. Unless you are using exactly the same tools to do exactly the same task as her demos, this book is not going to be much help.

If you buy this book thinking that you will learn how to implement various types and styles of menus you will be disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: Don't create a web menu without this book.
Review: I'm not finding the some of the CD exercises did I get a bad CD? or am I not seeing all then exersices? does anyone else have this problem?
Like chapter 3 for example - it's missing.
THanks

Rating:
Summary: How to get things done quickly and effectively
Review: If you already understand the basics of web design, this book will take you one step furthur. You'll quickly learn how to build effective, user friendly and compelling navigation into a site and how to organize information to give visitors the best interactive experience by allowing them quick access to what they need.

This book is an excellent, no nonsense, "roll up your sleeves and get it done rapidly" book that is thankfully low on jargon, buzzwords and puffery and high on technique and standards compliant code. I recommend it highly.

Rating:
Summary: A Good First Draft
Review: On several occasions, the author, Wendy Peck, admits to 'circling back' to previous topics, and hearing her readers 'muttering' about when she is finally going to get to the point. How true.

I gleaned some useful tips, such as where to find sources for 'tiny text' fonts on the Web. I found Peck's discussion of using tiny text and her chapter on CSS to be quite good. Unfortunately, the sum of this book is not equal to or greater than its parts. The book's organization seems good at a high-level, but Peck does not rigorously explain each topic and spends far too much space bragging about how she accomplished various tasks without setting forth a clear process for how her readers can follow in her footsteps. Her writing is often sloppy, with grammatical errors and clunky sentences.

Compared to the CD, however, Peck's writing is scintillant: files on the CD often do not match references in the book, and some of the files are rife with errors. The CD in Peck's earlier Dreamweaver book had similar problems. I know quality assurance isn't glamorous, but come on, somebody has to do it.

In the book itself, much space is wasted giving separate exercise directions for Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, and Fireworks. Pick one. Better yet, put these directions on the CD (provided someone at Hungry Minds can figure out how to make a good CD) and cut the size of the book by 1/4. If Peck also cut out the diarrheal happy talk that plagues nearly every paragraph, she'd be able to cut the size of the book even further. With better organization, exercises on the CD, and no cute chatter, we'd have a wonderfully useful 150-page book instead of a bloated 340-page tome.

Bottom line: many of the good parts in this book are available for free at webreference.com, where Peck writes a semi-regular column. Read her columns before you consider buying the book.

Rating:
Summary: CD items missing. Lowers book value substantially
Review: The book is tightly integrated with the CD exercises that are missing. Her dreamweaver book had similar issues also (poor editing). For an author that prides herself with 'organization' and being a perfectionist (her words not mine), this should be an embarrassment. I do like her writing though, maybe because she is writing something somewhat technical yet doesn't put me to sleep. My learning experience has been deminished substantually by not being able to complete the excercises.

Rating:
Summary: Finally! an intermediate-level design book
Review: The problem with web design books is that they all seem to be written either for the beginner or for the person with ten years of art training or programming background. This book at first appeared to be for beginners; and in fact, I probably knew 80% of what's in it. (I teach beginning Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Fireworks, and know a lot of the rules of design, but I was born without an art gene. Plus as a freelancer, sometimes I go long enough between jobs to forget what I learned from my last site.)

As I read this book from cover to cover, (skipping the Flash and Wireless chapters)I realized that its excellent summation of many design points was serving as a solid, mid-journey, take-stock refresher that let me put my knowledge into a new context. For example, Wendy takes issue with exporting an entire sliced page from a graphics program into an editing program. It took me two years to decide that YES, that way is easier, and now Wendy Peck has forced me to rethink about a faster way.

But most of all, I was very happy with the unexpected chapter on liquid design. I've spent uncountable hours trying to figure ways to acheive this: Wendy gives me an excellent starting point, mostly because she did the math to figure which fixed widths were the best compromise for stretching from 640 to 1200 pixels. Now what I really, really want is a book that starts from that chapter and goes on to demonstrate liquid design in a dozen different circumstances with step-by-steps that are as clear as Wendy's. WOULD SOMEBODY PLEASE WRITE THAT BOOK!!! And if it offers really useful coverage of the aspects of CSS that can be trusted to help achieve it without going to browser sniffing, I'll not only recommend it for all my classes I'll send the authors a cake and light candles for their successful life.

PS: Something I expected from this book and didn't get was an authortative summation of the chaos surrounding points versus pixels and the implications of making menus one and body text the other. As a consolation prize, I got excellent tips about using anti-aliasing fonts for small type menus and a sample of those fonts on the CD. (Haven't opened the cd yet, but if it has the problems other reviewers complain of, web references are also given for these fonts.)

Rating:
Summary: Good concept, bad execution
Review: This is a book for beginners with good concepts for organizing a website, BUT the book has many, many errors on the CD and in the information given, especially with regards to CSS. You will be very frustrated if you rely on the book to create great menus. The example menus on the CD are pretty basic and boring. Flash is discussed for navigation, but never mentioned in the book is that Flash links will not be noticed by search engines!! .css files on the CD are mistakenly .html files and visa versa. Also, example images often do not appear on the same page as the text explaining the examples. Discussion of example images in the book focus on color, but all images are greyscale and this makes it very difficult to utilize the image examples in the book.

There are a few good tips for more experienced designers, but hardly worth the price of the book.

Rating:
Summary: Every possible angle on web menus and more...
Review: Wendy Peck is a knowledgeable web designer and a wonderful teacher. She knows how to translate technical information into an enjoyable and understandable format. I felt that my skills in web design had been expanded each time I finished a chapter.

Although she covers the design and execution of web menus in depth, the book is also full of valuable advice on a wide range of topics such as understanding browsers, intranets, and wireless devices. As for designing menus, every possible angle is covered from browser compatibility to graphics production. There are sections on creating attractive text menus for wireless, liquid design for any browser resolution, automation and template tricks, and testing methods. There is even a chapter on how to create really tiny text that you can actually read. If she missed anything, I can't think of what it is.

I don't usually buy web development books. They are expensive and the information is often found on the web for free. I browsed this one in a bookshop and got pulled in. It turned out to be the best of both worlds, a satisfying read and a well organized reference book.