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Author/s : Vincent Flanders
Publisher : Sybex
Category : Web design, HTML and JavaScript
Review by : Salman Halim
Rating : 8 horseshoes</pre>
This book teaches the reader about what constitutes good Web site design and is the sequel to "Web Pages that Suck"; it does this primarily by way of negative examples: sites where the design is somehow flawed. Then, specific explanations of why the design is wrong are presented; this is accompanied by guidelines on how to fix some.
The book doesn't stop with just a series of Web site snapshots with large red crosses through them; there are general guidelines on how one can design a site to avoid the problems outlined. Each chapter ends with a summary of the more important points from the chapter. One of the features I enjoyed is the "Two-Minute Offense" sidebar where a specific Web page's snapshot is shown and the user is told to examine it for two minutes and try to spot all the problems -- an explanation of each problem the author spotted follows.
The companion CD contains several shareware utilities as well as all the links mentioned in the text -- because of the nature of the Web, some of the links are no longer valid and some of the Web sites mentioned in the book have changed their look. (Several did so after appearing on the author's site!)
The only thing that rubbed me the wrong way were the somewhat (intentionally) creepy photos of the author in various poses and garb on all the sidebars; they are meant to be amusing, but I just found them creepy.
More info at Amazon.com More info at Amazon.co.uk