Great Books to use in Web Design

I recently took Principles of Web Languages from Paul Cheney at Utah Valley University. It was a very good class in helping me learn more about web design and keeping updated on the new web trends. In the class my professor recommend some books to help us with our web designing skills and coding. I feel these books are a must have if you are serious about web design and development.


The first book is: HTML5 for Web Designers by Jeremy Keith. This book goes through all the new features of HTML5. Most of the new features in HTML5 are in doing forums. There are lots of new elements that will make your web forums look that much better on a mobile phone!

Also listed are some new HTML tags, so you don't have to use as many div's! Sweet! Some of the new ones include, header, footer, section, and article. Though not all browsers are compatible will all of HTML5 features, you can start implementing them. You can show people what they are missing out on, and hopefully the other browsers will get up to date based on user want.



The next book is CSS3 for Web Designers by Dan Cederholm. This book was one of my favorite to read because of all the cool new things you can now do with CSS. Mostly what is great is that you now doing have to use as much JavaScript, or C#, to make your website be more interactive.

Some of the new abilities include, transitions, opacity, and multiple backgrounds. This book also goes hand in hand with the HTML5 one, in giving more ways to enrich your forums. To see an example of all the cool things you can do with CSS3, check out this website made by Dan, Things we left on the Moon.


Mobile First by Luke Wroblewski is a must have, if you are wanting to be in the web industry. This book goes through all the reasons why when designing for the web you should first design for the phone, and not the desktop.

This book also got me thinking a lot, because there are tons of things you can do on the phone which you can't do on the desktop, and vise versa. Some of the things Luke mentions is gesture movements on a phone. How do we incorporate these into a website? Luke mentions how we have to think about taps, double tap, pinch, spread, rotate, etc. I wish I could explain the whole book to you, but Luke says it better, so go read it!

The last book that I recommend you have is Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte. This book by far I think is the most important to have, because responsive design is the way to go. You can't make a website not and not use responsive design!

Ethan goes through all the reasons why we need responsive design, and gives very easy to follow instructions on how to implement them into your website. The basics to responsive design is using media queries to detect the size of your browser, then use the appropriate CSS file. This is where mobile first becomes very important, because you want to build your CSS files where as you browser changes you add CSS and not take away. If you are confused, well then by golly go read this book!

All four of these books are a very easy read, the authors make it fun and interesting while giving you great information. All the book are also way short! They are the size of a normal reading book, and are only 100 pages! These four books are a must have if you want to be cutting edge in web design! There are also many more books in this series, A Book Apart, and feel free to check out any of those books here: http://www.abookapart.com/.