recommended reading

I had the pleasure (and I mean that) of reading Molly Holzschlag’s book Color for Websites.

Before you know it, I had a review of the book and a trip down a historical-biblio-self-history.

A few mandatory disclaimers…. First, realize that just because someone reads a book about colors does not mean that they are going to be a color expert… that’s not a reflection on the book… after all, I could read a book on fixing cars, but that doesn’t mean that I’d be any good at it.

Secondly, I learned when I wrote the 30 Days to becoming an Opera lover series that it’s important to state up front that I have not be hired (or even asked) to give a review of the book (someone thought that I was an employee of Opera Software, which I’m not… and I don’t know Molly other than some emails we have exchanged and I’ve read some of her books).

So, that said, I have to admit that I really liked this book. First of all, it’s beautiful to look at, as near to an art book of the web as I have seen. The dimensions of the book are quite large, the color swatches are rich and full, making it easy for you to see the colors and how they work together.

As with every computer-related book, you can pick up some of this information on the web. So why buy a book? Because the book brings it all together in a cohesive unit, gives you a reference you can keep by your side, and also includes some information that you are not likely to find on the web, at least not without a lot of looking.

There is a section on globalization of colors which is itself worth the asking price of the book. The web is an international space, and colors have different meanings to different people. For example, Molly talks about orange as being associated with things which are inexpensive. Here in Gainesville, however, Orange and Blue are the colors of the University of Florida Gators, so orange is something of a required color, almost a uniform. Then again, wearing orange on St. Patrick’s Day sends a message that you had better be aware of before you walk out of Logan airport wearing your brightest orange outfit on March 17th and suddenly wonder why you can’t get a cab.

Sometimes its easy to tell when two things don’t go well together (like Ethan’s outfit and the cover to Molly’s book, which could make you go cross-eyed if you looked at then too long). Other times you can work on a site and know that for some reason it’s just not quite working well together.

Molly goes through beginner and intermediate color training, giving you insights as to how to work color wheels (something I haven’t even thought about since my grammar school days). There are also several pages worth of color bands with the HEX codes for the colors. While I have a sidebar for color code quick reference it will be much nicer to have a real printed reference guide for future work.

For those of us who have not had training in working with colors (and especially for those of us [we know who we are] who tend to haphazardly choose color schemes without much thought) this book will be a handy addition to your web library.

Other Books in my Library

I realized the other day that what started with just a little bit of tinkering with web pages has, obviously, grown to something a lot more intense. A friend, after looking at the website, joked that I needed a hobby. I’m not sure how it escaped her that this is my hobby, but nevermind that…

I looked at my bookshelf and saw something of a timeline, an evolution if you will. There’s the now really old Inside Unix for when I was starting to learn the Unix commandline… GNU Emacs book from that month when I was convinced I had to learn Emacs or never achive true happiness. (Only to find out, somewhat paradoxically, that true happiness was, for me, found in not learning emacs or vi, and let those who wanted to deem my soul as lost content themselves to think as such.)

Getting into web design, there was an HTML 3.2 book which is actually gone now… I gave it away a year or two ago to someone who wanted to start learning the basics. I should probably apologize for that, but I didn’t know any better at the time. My first serious book was Special Edition Using HTML 4 (also by Molly, long before I knew who she was… in fact it was actually only this year that I put the two of them together… one of the benefits of having the surname Holzschlag, I guess, is that it tends to stick in your mind).

Then there was the tragic mistake of Novell’s Certified Web Designer Study Guide. There’s nothing wrong with the book per se (although I’m sure much of it is out of date now that it is 4-5 years old). Unfortunately, after reading it I made the mistake of thinking that HTML was far too complicated for me to ever be good at, and so I gave up for a long time after that. Then again, maybe it was a blessing in disguise, because by the time I came back to wanting to work the web, XHTML and CSS were close on the horizon and they are much more suited to my way of thinking and working (read: I hate nesting tables for layout…. it makes the voices in my head very irritable).

Then there are my two FreeBSD books, The Complete FreeBSD and FreeBSD: An Open-Source OS for your PC by Annelise Anderson. Both of these are from around the time when I knew that I was going to have to give up my NeXT and was struggling to deny the reality that I would end up with Windows. I would love/prefer to be running a Unix based OS but FreeBSD was going to take too much time for someone like me. I suspect my next computer will be a Mac, which will give me a great UI around a FreeBSD-like (Unix-like) core. Then again, if the rumors about Apple releasing an Intel-version of their OS come true, who knows….

Ethan’s generation will hopefully live to see the day when we can actually drop support for Netscape4

The real turning point came with CSS: The Definitive Guide by Eric Meyer. It was then that I started to say “Ok, this sounds like much more fun than the old way of doing things” and I really started having some fun with it. Cascading Style Sheets are just too cool to pass up.

After that there were a few XHTML books, which all went back because I realized that they really weren’t true XHTML books, they were HTML books where the publishers had said “Here, update some of this for XHTML” and I found all I needed online (if you know HTML, XHTML is not that big of a step, it’s really just a few simple conceptual differences that we really would have been better off if we had way back when).

Then came PHP. Oh, glorious PHP. Core PHP Programming by Leon Atkinson. I have barely scratched the surface of getting into all PHP can do, and I still love it. The true PHP/MySQL Bible PHP and MySQL Web Development by Luke Welling and Laura Thomson made me realize that programming and databases are now available to the commoners. Again, I know 1/10000th of what there is to know, and already I’m entralled. I also picked up Relational Database Design Clearly Explained which taught me that, sadly, MySQL is not a true relational database, but for my purposes will still work, and the book was good at explaining the theory behind database design.

But all of that was technical stuff. Then one day, a happy accident occurred. I was going through a bookstore (actually looking for something else) and I saw Zeldman’s Taking Your Talent to the Web: Making the Transition from Graphic Design to Web Design. Now I’m not a graphic designer, so I guess you could say the book wasn’t for me, but I was interested to see what it was all about, and my pre-sale flip through the book deemed it interesting enough to purchase (must be awful to write books over the course of months and years only to have some schlep come along and thumb through it in 15 seconds to decide whether or not to buy it).

That was really the first foray into Design Think™ where I started to consider how the site looked to people who weren’t me (again, don’t indict the book for any part of my design that you don’t like… People read the Bible all the time, doesn’t stop them from being jerks). I followed up with The Non-Designer’s Design Book (very good… still want to get the Typography book in that series) and Web Design Workshop by Robin Williams (no, not him, her) and Web Navigation: Designing the User Experience by Jennifer Fleming.

My next venture will be Javascript Bible which is about 3 inches thick and pretty intimidating. If nothing else I can use it to kill spiders (I’m sure it will be quite good, just haven’t had a chance to read it yet).

Whew. And here I thought I never read much any more. Take those and my morning blogs and I’ve pretty much got a full dance card when it comes to reading material.

So I’m going to go read some more. (If you’ve read all the way to the end here, thanks…. and now stand up and let the blood get back to your legs.)