Webmastering For Dummies

Webmastering, though it's fast retreating from the bleeding edge it once occupied, is one of the last jack-of-all-trades job descriptions. A good Webmaster has to know something (quite a bit, actually) about computer networking, telephone services, software, database design and administration, user administration, electronic money transactions, and tons more. The job is not just about knowing HTML and being familiar with some graphics software. In essence, that's the point that Webmastering for Dummies drives home to its readers. This book doesn't go into much detail on any aspect of the job of the Webmaster--particularly the more-or-less autonomous kind that doesn't function as part of a larger corporate information-technology group--but it provides a good overview of the job, and a moderate amount of valuable information.

You'll probably want to read this book, or at least its individual chapters, straight through in the way you would read a novel. The plot here isn't much, but the authors like to describe their subjects in English, rather than with code examples or protocols you can follow on a keyboard. It's good reading, though it's sometimes muddled by digressions into Web sites with design budgets in excess of $500,000. People with budgets like that aren't going to be reading Dummies books to figure out how to set up their sites. You won't be disappointed if you're starting from zero, but expect to do further research. --David Wall

Topics covered: The varied skills that are part of the Webmaster's trade, including goals assessment, content accumulation, e-commerce engineering, service-provider interaction, and coding with HTML.