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Web Menus with Beauty and Brains (With CD-ROM)
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Author: Wendy Peck
List Price: $29.99
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0764536435
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons (15 December, 2001)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 124,339
Average Customer Rating: 3.3 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 5 out of 5
How to get things done quickly and effectively
If you already understand the basics of web design, this book will take you one step furthur. You'll quickly learn how to build effective, user friendly and compelling navigation into a site and how to organize information to give visitors the best interactive experience by allowing them quick access to what they need.This book is an excellent, no nonsense, "roll up your sleeves and get it done rapidly" book that is thankfully low on jargon, buzzwords and puffery and high on technique and standards compliant code. I recommend it highly.
Rating: 2 out of 5
A Good First Draft
On several occasions, the author, Wendy Peck, admits to 'circling back' to previous topics, and hearing her readers 'muttering' about when she is finally going to get to the point. How true.I gleaned some useful tips, such as where to find sources for 'tiny text' fonts on the Web. I found Peck's discussion of using tiny text and her chapter on CSS to be quite good. Unfortunately, the sum of this book is not equal to or greater than its parts. The book's organization seems good at a high-level, but Peck does not rigorously explain each topic and spends far too much space bragging about how she accomplished various tasks without setting forth a clear process for how her readers can follow in her footsteps. Her writing is often sloppy, with grammatical errors and clunky sentences. Compared to the CD, however, Peck's writing is scintillant: files on the CD often do not match references in the book, and some of the files are rife with errors. The CD in Peck's earlier Dreamweaver book had similar problems. I know quality assurance isn't glamorous, but come on, somebody has to do it. In the book itself, much space is wasted giving separate exercise directions for Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, and Fireworks. Pick one. Better yet, put these directions on the CD (provided someone at Hungry Minds can figure out how to make a good CD) and cut the size of the book by 1/4. If Peck also cut out the diarrheal happy talk that plagues nearly every paragraph, she'd be able to cut the size of the book even further. With better organization, exercises on the CD, and no cute chatter, we'd have a wonderfully useful 150-page book instead of a bloated 340-page tome. Bottom line: many of the good parts in this book are available for free at webreference.com, where Peck writes a semi-regular column. Read her columns before you consider buying the book.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Promises unkept
I started to read this book with high hopes. I finished it feeling that I was still at the beginning. There was no follow through on the concepts. I did not learn much about how to implement various types of menus, nor on the fundementals of the underlying code and concepts to get me going on my own. With the exception of her discussion on CSS, which I feel is the only redeeming feature of the book (and why I gave it threes stars instead of two), I feel like I was listening to someone talk around the topic, rather than get to the heart of the matter. Unless you are using exactly the same tools to do exactly the same task as her demos, this book is not going to be much help. If you buy this book thinking that you will learn how to implement various types and styles of menus you will be disappointed.
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