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Review: Learning Web Design by Jennifer Niederst
I own and run four web sites, and I have been my own webmaster and -designer for four years. So what am I doing reading a book about web design for beginners?
Interesting question. One answer is that I have found out that when you just begin on something and pick things up here and there as you go along, you always miss some of the basics, sometimes most of them. Another is that because really good teachers are very rare, even if you make a study that seems more than adequate, you usually miss some basics anyway.
A very good example from Learning Web Design by Jennifer Niederst is that she starts the book with a brief history of the Web! Why does she do that, who cares, if all you want to do is put together a web site with modern means? Another good question with an equally good answer. The answer is that in its basics, the Web is not meant to be "designed" at all. It is meant to distribute information, to and from people who don't give a rat's tail how it looks, as long as they can read it. (For understanding the web even better, I recommend Weaving the Web, by the man who invented WWW, Tim Berners-Lee.) Without information like that, web "design" is extremely frustrating, especially for people who have some experience with design and typography for paper. Of course it can be a bit frustrating still, but having the basic explanation for things makes it possible to get over it fast.
Jennifer Niederst is very good at this. She starts really basic, even telling how to get your own domain and site, and the various pros and cons of different kinds of hosting solutions, etc. etc. One of the things that help her do this is that unlike many book authors, she has a lot of experience teaching pupils "in the real world", and knows what their questions are. Usually a writer lives in an Ivory Tower, and if she has known and used something for 10 years, she has forgotten that this is not something everybody knows.
Niederst wrote this book because she could not find a good basic book on web design to give to her pupils. I am glad she wrote it, and I wish it had been there in 1997 when I started making my own first site.
But even today there are lots of things I am learning from this book. It feels good to get things explained from the bottom up by someone who understands them, and I recommend the book not only for beginners, but for anybody who feels a little bit uncertain when have to look at raw HTML code those times the web design program messes up (and they do).
Yours, Eolake Stobblehouse
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