I am almost done with the Build Your Own Website the Right Way book and was wondering which of the following should be my next step:
HTML Utopia
The CSS Anthology
Sexy Web Design/The Principles of Building a Beautiful Website
Simply JavaScript
Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP & MySQL
I am pursuing web design as a career and am not an artistic type of person by any stretch of the imagination, but I can be pretty creative. I actually want to “specialize” I guess you could say) but I want to know enough about design to be able to create and maintain all aspects of the sites I will make for clients in the future.
I figure dev will come much more naturally than design so I am starting with design first so it has enough opportunities to stick.
I would agree with those choices. HTML, CSS and JavaScript are the three most important languages in terms of the front-end of web design. The CSS Anthology is a good book on getting to grips with what web design can offer (in terms of design) and the other would be perfect for getting to grips with JavaScript (which plays an ever increasingly important role in adding functionality to pages). Honestly as long as you know the languages and have a bit of creativity you shouldn’t have a problem in the design side (though there’s other topics of importance like accessibility and usability which aren’t language based but important as theory subjects - and SitePoint has no book for those, though I can recommend titles if you need some). The reason for the order of HTML > CSS > JavaScript > PHP is simply based on how everything “layers” in web design, you need structure for style to be applied to it, you need structure and style for behaviour to be noticeable and client-side behaviour is usually more design focused than server-side so proceeds it due to it’s arguably lesser complexity.
Awesome advice, Alex. A few books I have been suggested for accessibility include Paul Boag’s book, Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think, and Prioritizing Web Usability. What do you think of these?
I’m not sure Paul Boag’s book is the best one for accessibility (it’s more aimed at general web design and describing the basics for business people who don’t know much about the web), however “Don’t Make Me Think!” is an excellent book on usability (small but powerful) along with Prioritizing Web Usability (and it’s prequel which you should also read if you pick that one called Designing Web Usability) by Jakob Nielsen. Krug and Nielsen’s books will cover you for Usability, in respect to accessibility there’s a title called Web Accessibility by FriendsOfED which is pretty thick (lots of pages) but it’s the single best accessibility book on the market.
