Bulletproof Web Design

You know that feeling when you grok a programming language so that you spend far less time thinking about the how and thus are free to concentrate more on the what? That’s how I feel about Java and it’s how I’m beginning to feel about Ruby and Rails. The same can’t (or I should say couldn’t) however be said for (X)HTML+CSS. Until now.

Having scoured the net, read every web site I could find and even sat in bookstores for hours reading Eric Meyer, I still didn’t feel comfortable doing web page layout and design. I just didn’t get it. I spent so much time trying to work out how I would create a web page that I lost all my creative drive. I new there just had to be a simpler way. Surely (X)HTML+CSS gives me syntactic markup + layout?!

Finally, in a last ditch effort to put myself – and my friends on IM who I wouldn’t stop bitching to – out of misery, I spent a few hours in Borders (you know, the library with coffee) and stumbled upon Bulletproof Web Design by Dan Cederholm.

It’s a pretty easy read and the examples are very easy to follow. The layout of the book makes a big difference too. I love books that I can just open at any page and get a “nugget” then read on if I feel inclined to do so or even skip back a bit to learn a bit more. This is in stark contrast to the excellent but – for me at least – excruciatingly painful Eric Meyer books which are too densely packed and concentrate too much on the what rather than the how.

I’m still no expert (I’ve really just started) but if you too are in need of some very simple yet practical help in getting you started thinking with the right mindset, I can highly recommend it. If however you’re after an HTML+CSS reference manual or an O’Reilly hacks style of book for that matter, then you might like to try something else.