Contribute Friday: Web Development Recommendations
I get a lot of requests for web development book recommendations, but up until a few months ago, I’ve never read one! I always thought they were a bit bland and preferred to learn by doing.
Most of the ones I’m reading now are for advanced developers so it’s tough for me to recommend any books for beginners.
What web development books would you recommend? Are they for beginners or advanced users?
Image by kartooner
About the author
Amber Weinberg specializes in clean and semantic XHTML, CSS and WordPress development. She has over 10 years of coding experience and is pretty cool to work with. Amber is available for freelance work, so why not hire her for your next project?
Mastering Regular Expressions. Regex isn’t essential to web development, but when you’ve become comfortable with regex and know when and how to use it, then you’ve become a better developer. http://is.gd/bbofX
Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content from Presentation (it’s in the middle of your photo up there). A great book for beginners, but us old hands can also learn things from it…
Almost all of my books are computer science, algorithms, non-web programming languages, database, A+, MS Office, etc. I’m not very helpful recommending any for web dev. I have read two of the Quickstart Guide books (they’re purple with the rabbit logo). I read one for DHTML and one for XML. They’re pretty horrible. A lot of beginners may also be tempted to get Thompson Course Technology books. I recommend avoiding those as well. I almost want to say that they should stick to the web itself. W3Schools is an obvious good start. But that also depends on what kind of developer they want to be. If they want to be a programmer/developer, they should definitely get books on PHP, Python, Perl, SQL and server administration.
That picture would be identical to the one I would take at my local bookstore, they are the standard web design books.
Actually most the book stores I go to have shortened the book space for web design books, while programming books have expanded.
I agree with you 100% most are bland.
Magazines are a little better although the web design mags are expensive and one company bought out another and shortened the amount of pages and cost more isn’t that nice!.
As for books; O’Reilly Essential Actionscript 3.0, O’Reilly Learning PHP 5, Sams Teach Yourself MySQL in 10 Minutes, jQuery in Action, Learning jQuery 1.3. But for HTML, CSS, and basic Javascript you don’t really need books, the internet is a wealth of useless knowledge in those fields.
@Jeremy, I second Essential Actionscript 3.0. Fantastic book.
A little more on the business side of it, I’d recommend “The Web Design Business Kit 2.0″ by Brendon Sinclair.
It’s not cheap, but it’s definitely worth the money, especially if you’re just starting in the freelancing scene.
http://www.sitepoint.com/kits/freelance2/
Hmm What did you get from it that was very unique/useful? Does it have stuff that you can’t find on the web or less expensive books?
I’ve had the first book in the picture, Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think, recommended to me a few times.
As a beginner, I am reading HTML DOG, the book and the website, by Patrick Griffiths.
Both books are on my to-read list
Is HTML Dog more for beginners? I just really liked the cover 
@Amber, you must also get asked what software tools you use and/or would recommend.
Thanks for all the recommendations guys! Keep em coming!
One book that i found very good for both beginners and experienced people is Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design by Andy Clarke. Some of the examples are not fully explained for beginners, but is an excellent read…
I’ve heard good things about that book, will have to put it on my wish list
It is a must i think very friendly read as well very graphical..
I think the books from Sitepoint are good for beginner.
Also The Smashingbook from smashingmagazine is good.