Books that made me a better designer
This is a list of books that have had a big impact on the way I design & developer Web sites. A lot of the content in books now-a-days can be found on various blogs, but the books below all have something in them that I really haven’t been able to find anywhere else.
Transcending CSS
Andy’s book is obviously very technically good and well written. I certainly got a lot of information like that out of it, but at this point you can find most of it on various blogs. My biggest take away was how Andy spoke about semantics. Specifically using IDs like “branding” and “site-info” rather than “header” and “footer”. Up to that point I had just been using “header” and “footer” because it was how it was done at the time. Andy got me thinking heavily about semantics and naming schema and also opened up a lot of doors for me to really examine how I put together a site instead of blindly do it because it’s what I’ve heard is the best.
Bulletproof Ajax
I read this book right around the time I began playing with jQuery and it made me realize that, however great a library like jQuery may be, it won’t be around forever and if I don’t learn how it really works, I’ll be screwed when it finally disappears like so many other Web technologies. In Bulletproof Ajax I learned how exactly the XMLHTTPRequest worked, what jQuery was doing, and how it made it so easy to work with, all while keeping Web standards in sight and never putting something together that couldn’t function without JavaScript.
101 Things I Learned in Architecture School
Drawing lines seems like a stupid thing to want to learn, but that’s what this book effectively taught me. I learned the importance of some very basic design principles and how to effectively communicate those ideas to others through certain shapes and sketching techniques. This is a great book. I really got into it after a talk by Luke Wroblewski at the Web App Summit in Newport Beach.
Mobile Web Design
The first book to really spark my interest in the Mobile Web. Ever since reading it I’ve felt like I have a slight edge whenever beginning a project with mobile requirements. Most mobile books now focus on intense graphics and acceleration of devices like the iPhone. In Mobile Web Design, Cameron talks about a plethora of devices and focuses on Web standards rather than cool things you can do.
Obviously, I highly recommend all those these books, as they’ve had a pretty large impact on me as a designer & a developer. The best part about them is that they’re all pretty easy reads, they’re not the kind of books you have to spend a week or 2 reading.
Does anyone else have books like this? Or do we all just read blogs now?