multimedia

When I bought Zeldman's book I expected to get a clutch of juicy Crimean War Stories about web design. What I did get was a supremely practical guide to using web design painlessly and effectivly. This is a useful book which answers tough, intuitive questions that nobody else knows the answer to (and will never admit it). For instance, what is the best way to make your text look good on the internet if you are handling it from an "Illustrator-type" of image? Why does CorelDraw/Photopaint default to saving images for the web in 96 dpi? There IS a reason, read this book and find out what it is. Want to use CSS? What unit of measure is the best for text? Once you read this book you will KNOW. If you are a beginner or an intermediate web designer, this book is right up your alley. Don't miss Taking Your Talent To The Web--it is a classic from a wise man.-

I'm not a traditional designer and I'm not new to web design, so I likely wouldn't have ever purchased or read this book if I had not come into the possession of a complimentary copy.

But I do regularly check in with Zeldman's trio of important sites - A List Apart [alistapart.com], The Web Standards Project [webstandards.org], and of course his personal blog, Jeffrey Zeldman Presents... [zeldman.com] and have exchanged emails with the man - so my interest was more in how the author approached and presented the information, rather than the subject of the book itself.

I'm sure he would appreciate the "separation of style from content" approach I took to evaluating his book, which is something he stresses several times in this, as in myriad other of his writings on the web.

The book was enjoyable and I got more out of it than I thought I would (as it is aimed at those new to the field). Refreshing comparisons between the nature of print design and web design, as opposed to beginning with technical discussions of HTML syntax, and the friendly writing style make it stand out in a sea of good, but overly technical, reference books. It is also fun to read, and I often found myself surprised with how many pages I ended up going through in any given sitting.

The positives of the book were the honest discussion about how a designer really doesn't need to know JavaScript, just enough to know how to gank and adapt it to one's own needs; the acknowledgement of technical vs. artistic approaches to the medium; and the inevitable development of a methodology and client interaction inherent in being a web professional.

On the negative side, I would disagree with Zeldman's assertion that CSS is purely supposed to be the responsibility of the designer, not the "HTML technicians."

Additionally, I felt the code samples a bit inconsistent, tough to read interspersed as they were in the text in an orange variable-width font, and felt myself fighting the urge to "clean them up." I could chalk this up to my own personal preferences about coding style - 4 space indentation and uniform lowercasing of HTML and CSS - but I'm sure that, as founder and member of the WaSP, Zeldman himself looks back on his nearly 2 year old code and cringes at times. To his credit, he does have a mini-site dedicated to errata and bugs: http://zeldman.com/talent/

This book opened my eyes to issues such as accesibilty, css and xhtml, I now have a site that is fast to load and easy to update. I found this book to be an easy read,[ I am neither a graphic designer nor a trained web designer] I really like Zeldman's writng style and will use some of his points in my classes web design for photographers. The mix of code and ideas was great and for once I just read the book rather than being tempted into turning on my computer and starting work.