250 HTML and Web Design Secrets

Rating:
Summary: Concise and thorough reading for any web designer
Review: I'm always hungry for new knowledge as a web designer, looking for that one trick to make my site either faster, easier to understand, accessible, and better. Sure, you could scour the web for weeks, looking for all the little tips and tricks that makes a good website great, or you can get this book and discover it all easily. All from a person who has, for many years, made the web a better place.

Molly's attention to detail, her teaching methods, and approach to giving these secrets and tips makes is utterly easy to digest and remember. By all means, this book is a treasure trove of knowledge that belongs in every web designer's personal collection.

Rating:
Summary: Easier long term maintenance
Review: If you have already used HTML to make some web pages, then this book might be of value. That is, if you plan on adding more pages or perhaps you want to maintain the website hosting these pages? The book talks about how to handle this next level of complexity. The author does not bog you down in the fine details of HTML syntax. Instead, she gives many suggestions ["secrets"] on making a logical arrangement of content. Like giving simple, intuitive names to the directory hierarchy and files. So that users can traverse your website easily.

Typically, most of the suggestions are of this style. The payoff is often easier long term maintenance. Like her ideas on effectively using CSS and XHTML. Again, like with HTML itself, you need some minimal prior acquaintance with these packages, to take advantage of this book.


Rating:
Summary: Good reference to keep at hand
Review: This is one of the few web books that has great breadth and gives sufficient depth to help not only the novice, but a seasoned web developer. This book has been quite helpful for the web team I am on to understand what current best practices are and how we get to this level.

There are so many poorly developed sites on the web it is great to have a book at hand to point to when needing to explain how to do it right. Molly's book is one of the quickest ways to start building web sites right

Rating:
Summary: Preview in person
Review: To be certain there are some invaluable hints in this book. But since the items covered are just spots of information from here and there around the landscape of web and design standards you need to check this book out in person to make sure you are getting your moneys worth. In particular I liked the material on CSS layout, but I was disappointed with coverage of basic topics like web safe colors, which requires a more in-depth discussion than the few paragraphs presented. Worth the look, but be sure to look before you buy.