Smashing Magazine provided a wealth of expert tips, advice and suggestions in its popular and valuable 35 designers x 5 questions article. To celebrate its one year anniversary, the magazine found more experts and asked new questions. The result is 50 designers x 6 questions, which contains over 170 new tips answering the following six questions:

• What is one typical myth about web-development (which is not true)?
• What is one bulletproof method to get over creativity block?
• What is one thing you wish you knew before you’ve started programming/designing/… ?
• What is one thing to do before starting a new project?
• What is one common mistake you should always avoid developing web-sites?
• What is one device/tool or/and service you can’t imagine your life without?

Freelance writers, editors, and anyone involved in any aspect of Web design or working with projects will benefit from the responses.

Having been in process management in a software organization for over ten years, I’ve seen too many articles and books on the topic that worked better than Valium for putting me to sleep especially since they have no side effects. Joel Spolsky is known as one of the best (if not the best) writers on the topic of software. However, in this book he stands aside and lets others demonstrate that he isn’t the only one who can write about software in English and captivate you.

Joel on Software (his Web site slash blog) fans won’t be disappointed in the selection of authors as they deal with the concepts he writes about on his site. Some readers may be expecting a book solely on software development. Even Joel goes beyond this. Some folks might be disappointed that most of the articles, blog entries, speeches, and essays are available somewhere on the Web. I only recognize a few of the authors and their articles, so I would’ve never known about the others had I not found this book.

The essays cover a gamut of development-related topics. They include coding style, outsourcing programmers, dealing with Excel as a database, using social software (Friendster, LinkedIn, Tribe, and all that) and the things that are right and wrong withthese shared spaces, emerging digital rights, and defining the two-phase commit process a la Starbucks. Even a couple of them are nothing but comics. The one on Windows search knocks its readers out of their chairs laughing, at least it did for me.

The book also contains business-related essays that address a few problems affecting many companies — namely team compensation and forced overtime which often spills over the weekend. Joel introduces every essay and includes notes clarifying abbreviations, names, or terms that aren’t widely known. After all, the world of software is vast and it’s impossible to know everything about it.

The manager benefits from the book because she gains insight into the developer’s perspective which could help her become a better leader. The developer benefits because many of the issues covered can impact him no matter what language he uses for development. If you belong to neither management nor development, the best way to decide if the book is for you or not is to review the table of contents and reviews. If you find only one or two interesting possibilities, search for them online instead.

I’m one of those who belong to neither group. My software organization background has been along the lines of an analyst and process manager. Even I find that most of the essays are enjoyable or educational. Only one or two lost me.

While most of the content is available on the Internet for free, the book is worth the bucks. It’s nice having a collection of high-quality writing related to software and the business in one place instead of schlepping the Web for it. Furthermore, you get an opportunity to read about business offline — I find that I read most of the book while traveling on an airplane. The flight flew by thanks to the book. I appreciated and absorbed the essays better by reading them in the book than I would have had I read them online.

Title: Best Software Writing I: Selected and Introduced by Joel Spolsky
Author: Edited by Joel Spolsky
Publisher: Apress
ISBN: 1590595009
Date: June 2005
Format: Paperback
Pages: 328
Cover Price: USD: $24.99 Amazon: $16.49

Try as you might to take a class in JavaScript or implement scripts by using online resources, it remains on your to do list. You search the Internet for the scripts and can never find the exact one you want or even close enough to do tweaking. Perhaps, it’s time to try an alternative and just buy a book on the subject and dive in.

This is the book for beginners and intermediates who are comfortable with HTML and lack the time to learn how to implement JavaScript from scratch or without resources. Negrino and Smith set up the book by the “things” you want your Web site to do rather than walk you through all the definitions, objects, operators, syntax, and all that stuff that would make the non-programmer’s eyes glaze over. There are other books that serve that purpose.

Open the book and go to the table of contents, find what you need, and start adding it to your Web pages. Screenshots and lines of code are on every page of the book with step-by-step guidelines of how to use and implement the script. You don’t even have to type the code from scratch. Instead, go to the book’s companion Web site to get the code and fix it up to meet your needs – a great time saver.

If you own an earlier edition of the book, this one has 100 more pages of new material including new chapters on 7 – Forms and Regular Expressions, 11 – CSS, 13 – User Interface Design with JavaScript, 14 – Applied JavaScript, and 15 – Bookmarklets. Furthermore, the scripts in the older editions have been revised to ensure compliance with current Web standards.

Chapter 7 – Forms and Regular Expressions show how to validate email addresses, file names, and URLs. It gives you a gentle introduction to regexes (regular expressions). Don’t panic at the thought of them especially with the handy table of expressions and associated characters. Once you try them out, you’ll wonder what you ever did without them.

Chapter 13 – User Interface Design with JavaScript gives you the opportunity to create pull-down and sliding menus. Chapter 14 – Applied JavaScript has directions for creating a slideshow with captions and generating bar graphs.

Colorful additions to the book are the Object Flowchart and Object Table printed in color to show you which objects are compatible with which browsers. The flowchart may be a challenge for beginners, but the table makes up for it by listing the object along with its properties, methods and event handlers.

If you’re looking to get cooking with JavaScript, look no further than this cookbook with easily modifiable recipes. It belongs on the Web designer’s reference shelf.

VITAL STATISTICS
Title: JavaScript for the World Wide Web, 4th Edition: Visual QuickStart Guide
Author: Tom Negrino & Dori Smith
Publisher: Peachpit Press
Publication Date: April 2001
ISBN: 0201735172
Format: Paperback
Pages: 440
Price: US$19.99

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