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.

The book is aimed at web developers and designers who want to customise the look and feel of a standard MediaWiki installation. Carter recognises that most people will find the default theme, monobook, rather dull. Whilst it is used fairly effectively on the Wikipedia site, it soon becomes tiresome after the third or fourth MediaWiki powered site you visit. Carter ably demonstrates that following a few simple steps will put you well on your way to stamping your own identity on your wiki. My personal aim was to make our MediaWiki wikis use Open University branding and web styles and standards. The steps in this book made it a breeze.

The content of the book perhaps goes over and beyond the call of duty. Whilst it covers all the things you’d expect: layout, headers, navigational systems and other user interface elements, I wasn’t expecting to find an entire chapter on integrating the software with social networking sites. Still, it was a nice surprise and actually incredibly useful. There’s also a nice appendix on troubleshooting browser issues which includes fixes for the ancient Internet Explorer 5. Some might consider this sort of stuff outside the scope of the book. Indeed there are plenty of dedicated CSS and HTML web design books to thumb through at your local Waterstones but it’s a nice touch that serves to indicate that the author really does live and breathe MediaWiki and web design.

The entire process of creating a MediaWiki skin is covered in relation to the book’s case study, a fictional theme called JazzMeet. From planning (purpose and audience) through design (html, css, javascript) to development (php). Key subjects such as usability, information architecture and the various page states are well documented.

One personal irritation. A default install of MediaWiki calls the homepage Main Page and it’s not obvious how you change it to something more useful. As hard as I searched within this book I still couldn’t find the answer. Maybe this is out of scope of a book on Skinning MediaWiki as opposed to administrating MediaWiki but as a designer it’s a task I find myself performing with each and every new install. I want the homepage to announce itself as something more meaningful than Main Page. This is a minor annoyance though as a little searching on the web will find the answer.

MediaWiki Skins Design offers a nice structured approach to creating a usable, customised template for your wiki. You can happily skip the chapter on decorative touches if you’re a designer by trade and try your hand at some of the more complicated stuff. For anything you need to know that isn’t in the book there’s the official MediaWiki documentation. If you just want a practical step by step guide book to creating MediaWiki skins then this is the book for you.

Read a sample chapter from MediaWiki Skins Design (PDF, 1.26mb).

On the way we meet a dodgy pensioner who scams people out of their hard-earned by pretending his car’s broken down and he can’t afford the train home. Rather than get really angry at the guy, Danny sets up a “keep Raymond Price out of trouble fund“. He also creates the official Join Me song that can be downloaded from the Join me website.

Read the book, download the song – it’s all utterly hilarious!

• Cascading Style Sheets: The Designer’s Edge
• Defensive Design for the web
• Designing web usability
• Designing with web standards
• The complete guide to Digital Graphic Design
• Don’t make me think
• Eric Meyer on CSS
• Homepage usability
• Logo design that works
• The non-designer’s design book
• The art of looking sideways
• HTML and XHTML – The definitive guide
• Web graphics for non-designers
• WebRedesign | Workflow that works
• Web standards solutions
• PHP and MYSQL for dynamic web sites

I hope to post my own reviews of these books sometime. For now, read the reviews on Amazon – they’re fairly balanced.

Are you Dave Gorman proved to be a highly entertaining read. Written by Mr. Gorman and his journalist flatmate, Danny Wallace (if you’re a Southampton fan like me then it’s not who you’re thinking of), the book is a factual account of how a drunken pub-bet turned into a six month gallivant around the globe in search of people called Dave Gorman. It’s a strange and pointless quest that Dave is determined to complete. If Danny hadn’t bet Dave that he couldn’t meet 54 Dave Gorman’s (one for every card in the deck) then this book wouldn’t exist. And my life would be much emptier as a result. I don’t know if it’s something to do with being in the same age and gender bracket as the authors but it was a story to which I could thoroughly relate. It’s the sort of crazy thing you do as a carefree student. Difference here being that both are past that frivolous student time and spending ridiculous amounts of cash to go to Scotland, France, America and more without any particular hope of paying it back. Dave funded the whole thing with credit cards and ignored all the bills. Doubtlessly, he probably paid back his loans with the cash from the resultant book and TV series. Wallace plays a great hard-done-by sidekick and we sympathise with him as his girlfriend, Hanne, gets a little annoyed that he’s spending all his time searching for Dave Gorman’s! I defy anybody to not enjoy this book. It’s well-written, never loses pace and is definitely one you find difficult to put down. Reading this book was one of the highlights of my holiday. When I got back I just had to read�

�Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack adventure: is a much more soberly written book. The energy and enthusiasm is still there but the lack of Wallace’s input into the ‘adventure’ leaves us without anybody to question Dave’s equally crazy task: to get ten googlewhacks in a row before his 32nd birthday. It’s quite a thing to explain but basically the task involves using the Google search-engine to type two dictionary-define words that lead to just one resultant web site. The book has lots of diagrams and in-depth explanation as to how this works which inevitably leads it into being a slightly less accessible book to the predecessor. Still, if you’re internet-savvy, you’ll find this to be an amusing yarn. Whilst he didn’t set out to write this book (indeed most of it involves him doing anything but write a book) he was under some degree of pressure to get out some product. He paints himself as being a more grown up Dave Gorman with a beard. Whilst in Texas he has a tattoo of himself with a beard painted onto his arm (one of the story’s highlights). His attempts at distancing himself from the carefree DG who wrote “Are you Dave Gorman” mean there’s a lot more self-analysis and emotion talked about within the pages. In the previous book Danny had taken care of this side of things. And he did it in a more amusing way. There’s not so much a sense on kinship and fun in Googlewhack but it is a great read nonetheless. Now to seek out Wallace’s novel “Join me”…