Books

As valuable as the internet can be for designers, artists and developers, I still feel that books are equally, if not more valuable. They're physical, unchanging and protable. You can take them places where there is no internet access.

Of course, I am a bit biased, since books are one of my absolute favorite things in the world, whether they be fiction, non-fiction or reference.

Regardless, here is a collection of some of the books that i have found either inspiring or absolutely invaluable throughout the years.

The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web (Voices That Matter)

By Dave Shea, 2005

This is a great book for inspiration and information. It is based on Dave Shea's conceptual website css Zen Garden, which effectively showcases the incredible flexibility of Cascading Style Sheets.

The book uses several of the different submission designs in order to address and consider different issues of design.

It is an extremely useful book, but be advised that a basic understanding of CSS is really required in order to fully appreciate the content.

Stylin' with CSS: A Designer's Guide

By Charles Wyke-Smith, 2005

This is one of the few reference books that I have actually sat down and read cover to cover, and it was completely worth it. For years, I had been struggling with using style sheets. I had learned HTML in a sort of mashed up, thrown-to-the-fire, just-do-it sort of way, but when I tried to do the same thing with CSS, well I failed to grasp the technology's simple beauty and produced frighteningly horrible style sheets.

Finally, I decided that enough was enough and that I had to get this CSS thing sorted out. I went to the book store, selected this book from a myriad of others, on account of its simplicity and clean layout. I then brought it home and started reading.

And the light came on. Over the course of just a few chapters, Wyke-Smith outlined the basic concept of CSS, demonstrated its wide range of uses and helped me establish a firm conceptual foundation, which has allowed me to implement complex style sheets easily and (relatively) painlessly.

If you are just learning CSS, I highly recommend this book.

JavaScript: The Complete Reference, Second Edition

By Thomas Powell, 2004

I picked this book up in 2005, when I started to have a more significant need for JavaScript. Although there was a great deal of information available on the internet, I was looking for a more centralized repository of knowledge.

This book proved to be just what I was looking for, and just what it's title promised. There has not been to many problems that this book has not been able to help me solve. And, for those rare occasions where I could not solve the problem, it was more often than not due to the simple fact JavaScript simply could not be made to perform a particular task.

To this day, I still refer to this book on a regular basis.