Author Archive

Ajax has been a hot topic for quite a while now, and there seems to be a new book with the eponymous Greek warrior in its title pretty much every week. Coming in at just 207 pages, Jeremy Keith’s new book, Bulletproof Ajax, is the latest to join the fray. With only 200 odd pages how does he plan to cover such a complex subject you may be asking? Well, here’s the secret – Ajax is really quite simple when you get down to it.

Jeremy’s previous book, DOM Scripting, stands as a fantastic introduction to JavaScript in general and DOM Scripting in particular and Bulletproof Ajax follows on from that title to some degree. Although you get a short introduction to the JavaScript language it’s just enough to understand the examples (I’d recommend you have at least a passing knowledge of JavaScript before reading this book). Also if you are coming to Ajax as a server side programmer then this book is probably not what you’re looking for, but worth reading at a later date. Given the client-server nature of Ajax there are server-side code examples (in PHP) but these are generally brief and serve only to support the examples rather than look at real world usage. Again, it would be useful to have at least a passing familiarity with a server side language and to be able to know if you already have a web server handy to experiment with.

The book features plenty of sample projects – for instance a simple address book is built up, showing off how to use XML, JSON and HTML as data sources and introducing the central XMLHTTPRequest object. There’s lots of focus, as you would expect, on making these examples bulletproof, in this case making sure they work even if JavaScript is unavailable using a method called Hijax.

To go from simple inline event handlers through to completely unobtrusive, object-based code and discussions of closures in JavaScript would be pretty good going for a book twice the size. It’s testament to the clear, no-nonsense and eminently readable writing style that this never bogs down the examples. Some people are bound to complain about the use of the proprietary innerHTML property and the minimal coverage of XML and JSON in the larger examples. This seems to be a facet of the scope of the book and a pragmatic approach to the problem rather than an unintentional oversight. If you’re looking for an A-Z of building an enterprise Ajax application then you’re probably looking for another book (but you should read this one first anyway!).

An entire chapter is dedicated to Accessibility and Ajax, a hugely important subject and one I’ve not seen mentioned anywhere else to date. Although the chapter lacks equivocal conclusions (mainly because no one seems to have formed any yet) it raises all the important issues for discussion and debate and provides a solid set of references for further reading. Throughout the book everything is anchored on the importance of user experience, rather than simply using technology for technology’s sake; this makes Bulletproof Ajax stand out from the crowd of more technology-focused tomes on the subject.

As a standards savvy developer if you want to get up to speed quickly with the hows and whys of modern Ajax but don’t have the time to wade through an awful lot of blog posts then Bulletproof Ajax is worthwhile reading. If you already know what you’re up to then it’s a perfect book to recommend to your unenlightened colleagues. A perfectly digestible read for one of those long train journeys!

Book Name: Bulletproof Ajax
Publisher: New Riders
Author: Jeremy Keith
URL: http://bulletproofajax.com
Price: $34.99 USD Buy Bulletproof Ajax at Amazon and save 34% off the cover price!
Rating out of 5: 3.5

The cascade, inheritance, contextual selectors. As someone who has been using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in the real world for a while it’s sometimes easy to forget it can be tricky to get started. Beginning CSS Web Development, written by Simon Collison, aims to get you on the road to creating usable, compact, good looking, well structured, and easy to maintain websites.

Anyone familiar with Simon from his long running blog, collylogic.com (now found at colly.com), can expect the same easy reading tone and witty repartee. Colly’s long-running obsession with music proves useful too; with the obligatory case study and examples feeling more real world than in most web design books. Although on second thoughts a band featuring Keith Moon, Jimi Hendrix and Simon himself may be too good to be true…

The book progresses through using CSS to style all the basic HTML elements, concentrating on the sorts of things that real world designers get up to most of the time; there’s an entire chapter on lists for example. A few excepts stood out as particularly well placed; a good discussion of typography on the web with some practical alternatives to the oft used web safe fonts, details of the most common image formats and when to use them and a particularly clear explanation of the complexity of floats.

Coming from someone like Simon it should go without saying that the book is up to date. Fixed vs liquid vs elastic vs variable fixed width layouts, faux column and large footers, accessibility and even IE7 are all mentioned at some point. Links are provided where relevant to helpful sites which should help minimize the inevitable impact of print going out of date.

As well as practical examples the book provides a useful compendium of the state of the art when it comes to CSS; coding styles, Douglas Bowman’s flags, commenting, indenting, modular style sheets, ideas for organizing style sheets. This information is available online, but would require wading through scattered blog posts from the last several years or reading the css-discuss archives from end to end. In short if you’re just starting out then Beginning CSS Web Development will save you time.

The only problem I have with Beginning CSS Web Development stems from the title, specifically the CSS part. Web design and development is a multi-tiered discipline, and CSS often stands or falls on the strength of the underlying markup. The book assumes the reader has a good understanding of modern, semantic, markup practices and as such is not ideally suited for everyone. It also doesn’t provide that much material for the experienced designer or developer that they probably haven’t seen before.

In short the book is a sign of a maturing industry. It is ideally suited for use in teaching, either students or other professional developers, the joys of CSS. It probably won’t be your first web design book, and neither should it be your last but it will provide a constant companion and reference for those starting on the road to becoming the next web design rock star.

Book Name: Beginning Web Development
Publisher: Apress
Author: Simon Collison
URL: http://csswebdevelopment.com/
Price: $34.99 Save 30% on Beginning CSS Web Development at Amazon
Rating out of 5: 4

Documentation. Makes you want to call it a day and start with some real work tomorrow. Or at least that’s the reaction that you often come across in web design, even with seasoned developers and designers. Yet the biggest problems we often come across in our work are ones related to communication; problems with people from marketing; clients with bad ideas; management with worse ideas. What if you could make them understand your vision? Documentation is the answer.

Communicating Design, by Dan Brown is one of very few books that address the subject of documenting a modern web design project. With chapters ranging from personas and usability testing to content inventory, sitemaps and wireframes, the book covers a lot of ground, with something for everyone; from project managers to interface designers.

The chapters each follow the same general format, and can be read in pretty much any order – making the book an ideal reference to have lying around. Each chapter breaks the chosen deliverable into three layers; essential, enhancements and contextual information, which makes getting started easier and further adding to the book’s reference potential. The chapters also include tips on presenting the various documents, and useful information which places them in the wider context of a project.

Dan Brown does a very good job of describing a potentially dull subject in useful ways. As a long time contributer to Boxes and Arrows and an active member of the Information Architecture community his experience comes through in the examples, and in particular the real world problems you may encounter when using the proposed deliverables. These sections on when, how and what to deliver to clients really raise the book into must-read territory.

The most impressive aspect of the book though is the up-to-date discussion. Not content with describing what makes a good site map and how to present it we get the author’s well-thought out ideas on whether sitemaps are indeed up to the task in a world of user-generated content, search and non-hierarchical site structures (probably not apparently). In another chapter a disussion of the problems involved in carrying out a large content inventory are accompanied by details of why the perfect tool for the job is difficult to come by.

A minor issue is that the book focuses on the documentation of the interface design aspects of a web design project at the expense of including chapters or comment on documenting the more technical, functional, aspects of development. In fairness it doesn’t set out to plug this gap in the market, although personaly I’d love to see a follow up in the same style. Communicating Development anyone? With all the diagrams throughout the book full colour would have been nice, but these really are minor points.

Overall Communicating Design is a good read, covering techniques that you can jump right in with, and providing hard earned, real world knowledge in digestable chunks. For anyone interested in improving their design documentation this will be a solid purchase, for anyone not interested in creating better documentation this should be required reading.

• Book Name: Communicating Design
• Author: Dan Brown
• URL: http://www.communicatingdesign.com/
• Price: $39.99USD Save 34% on Communicating Design at Amazon
• Rating out of 5: 4