Web Design in a Nutshell
by Jennifer Niederst

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Book Reviews of Web Design in a Nutshell

Book Review: Over-stuffed nuts!
Summary: 4 Stars

Does the book succeed? Certainly on all aspects of HTML, especially cross-browser issues, it is a perfect one-stop shop. I like the fact that Lynx gets more than a passing mention, and that accessibility for the blind and partially-sighted is covered. Cascading Style Sheets are well covered too, though it's unfortunate that the table of CSS compatibility is relegated to an Appendix, rather than integrated with the main chapter on CSS syntax. Chapters on GIFs and JPEGs are very informative, discussing all the salient points of palettes and compression. However the book clearly overreaches itself when it comes to DHTML, XML, CGI and Javascript, the chapters on these topics being much less in depth than for HTML, CSS and graphics. The author acknowledges these limitations more explicitly in the Preface than the publishers do on the back cover :-) These are good introductory discussions for those who want to move on from basic HTML, but anyone wanting a genuine desktop guide to these topics will have to fork out for a separate tome. (ORA's DHTML, CGI and Javascript books are excellent, by the way, but we're still waiting for them to come up with the definitive XML manual.)

One other criticism (which I'm surprised to find myself making of an ORA book): web browsers and related tools on Windows and Macintosh are well-covered, but Unix/Linux tools barely get a look in. What features are/aren't supported on Unix versions of Netscape? Doesn't the GIMP graphics program deserve a mention?

Quibbles apart, Web Design in a Nutshell is the sort of book that every web designer needs: essential, yes, but not as comprehensive and quintessential as I'd hoped (however unreasonably!), so I'll have to knock off one crown!

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