Robin Williams Web Design Workshop

Although Dreamweaver, GoLive, Photoshop, and other applications are mentioned (Flash even gets its own chapter), the book covers the gamut of Web design and technology issues rather than focusing on an individual application.

Each chapter is divided into sections, often no more than a couple of pages long. The chapter on backgrounds, the area of a Web page that seems to attract the worst design crimes, shows you how to avoid "the heartbreak of bad background design" in no less than eight sections.

In many books this subject would be lucky to get eight paragraphs; Robin Williams Web Design Workshop uses a clear two-column layout and plenty of real-life example screen shots to get the message across. Some pages consist only of captioned screen shots providing a great source of visual ideas.

There's a good balance between purely design-related issues and the technical stuff. Subjects like search engines, embedded fonts, DHTML, and forms are given a thorough overview, highlighting the main issues, and links to sources of more in-depth information are often to be found at the end of the chapter.

If you like to learn by example and see yourself more as a designer than a programmer, but want a working knowledge of current Web technologies from a book that you can read away from your computer, this is it. --Ken McMahon, amazon.co.uk