Mark illustrates each of his points with a case study from his own vast portfolio and other examples from the web and print. Be it the enormous task of redesigning the Drupal community or the De Standard newspaper websites to the time he spent designing endless tables of printed data in his early career. The book has bags of personality and really does fill a void in my bookcase that has been begging to be filled for some years.

Mark self-published his book and the attention to detail cross the entire process shines through. The enclosed postcards show us that this is the first in a series of five simple steps books and the handwritten compliment slip really added to the whole experience. Even the box it was delivered in showed that ever ounce of the design had been poured over for unending hours. I can wholeheartedly recommend it.

Buy Five Simple Steps, A practical guide to designing for the web direct from Mark Boulton Design LTD for £29 or get the PDF for £12.

Firstly, I’m a web designer, not a developer. Scripting scares me. I’m really out of my comfort zone when I need to bring a web page to life with things like Flash Action Scripting or, in this case, Javascript.

Secondly, I’m a fairly practical kind of bloke who would rather just get something done as a proof of concept and work out how to improve it later. I don’t want to learn a language like PHP or Javascript from the ground-up before I can do something like tab interfaces, resizable boxes and drag and drop widgets. So I never have.

The jQuery User Interface (UI) Library is preceisely the kind of thing that I need in order to rapidly prototype web interfaces. It’s a set of well tested widgets, compatible with all modern browsers (and some old ones).

This book explains in great detail, with full code examples, how to quickly get cracking with every part of the library. This includes tabs, accordions, pop-ups, sliders, date pickers, auto-complete, drag and drop, resizing, selecting, sorting and various animations.

What I most enjoyed about this book was the rapid pace that Wellman moved me through each of the widgets. First he explains the purpose of the widget followed by the default implementation, how to style of ‘skin’ the widget to your own requirements and then onto the more intricate details of chaning how it behaves. This kind of approach is very accessible to me.

As a designer I’m quite interested in making the widgets fit the look and feel of my design. It’s rare that I ever want to use the default style and if it’s not easy to change the chances are I’ll look elsewhere. Each and every jQuery UI widget can be styled to exacting requirments and Wellman is keen to highlight this fact.

I get the feeling I’ll be frequently referring to the chapters on tabs, dialogues, resizing, selecting and sorting the in my day to day work. This is the kind of book you can confidently dip into when you have a specific problem to solve and one that will be a valuable addition to and web design bookshelf.

jQuery UI 1.6 by Dan Wellman is published by Packt Publishing and is £27.99

Read a sample chapter or buy the book direct from Packt Publishing.

Yet javascript opens up a world of exciting behavioural options to us. It enables us to bring our pages to life with all the wizzy and cool stuff that clients love. Things swishing in and out of view, dropping down, sliding, expanding and contracting. Javascript brings our flat designs to life. But it’s difficult. That’s one reason why jQuery was invented — to make life easier for web designers. If you’ve already mastered HTML and CSS then you’ll find jQuery a logical next step. It uses a similar code style to CSS rather than the all out alien language of raw javascript. Learning jQuery 1.3 from Packt Publishing (ISBN 978-1-847196-70-5) is the only book you’ll need to get started with the library if like me you’re a web design who wants to add a little extra umph to your designs.

You’ll realise that this is definitive tome when you see that it contains a glowing foreword by John Resig, the creator of jQuery. He praises the authors, who he knows personally and gives Karl Sedberg a particular thumbs-up for his excellent knack for the English language. Indeed the themes in this book are relayed to the reader in accessible chunks of to-the-point tutorial that will immediately have you eager to boot up your PC and get cracking with showing and hiding, fading, bringing content into the page by the power of AJAX, sorting tables and all manner of glittering delights that were hitherto beyond your mortal reach.

I was in the process of building a new website using the usual solid webstandards that have kept me in work with my current employer for the last seven years when this book landed in my in-tray. One chapter in and I was hooked. My original pretty and functional site was soon awash with plenty of little jQuery effects and goodies. Probably overkill for what was actually needed but once you start playing it becomes pretty difficult to leave alone. Remember when you discovered all those photoshop layer effects? Remember how you used them in earnest way back when? You’re going to do the same again here. But as time goes on you learn to use where appropriate and go throwing everything including the kitchen sink into a design. JQuery is another set of tools to add to your ever expanding web design toolbox and this is the manual.

Learning jQuery 1.3 by Jonathan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg is published by Packt Publishing (ISBN 978-1-847196-70-5) and has a recommended retail price of £24.99.

Read a sample chapter or buy it direct from Packt Publishing.