Welcome to our book recommendation page. These books are all wonderful resources for the current web designer’s arsenal. We’ve read them all.  There always seems to be an endless supply of new books and technology to consume and review with web design. If you’ve worked in this industry for any amount of time, you know what we mean.

Designing with Web Standards, 2nd edition

This is the book that started the revolution. Jeffrey Zeldman’s Designing with Web Standards layed down the foundation upon which alistapart.com, webstandards.org, and the movement by browser makers towards more unified standards support were built. Thank your lucky stars kids, if this book wasn’t around browser makers would still be making up their own proprietary code, and we’d be stuck in an eternal downward spiral of code forking. If you’re a web designer and you don’t own this book, you haven’t seen the light. It should be noted that while this book is filled with absolutely essential theory, the examples will be a bit dated. Then again, we still have to support Internet Explorer 5.5 these days in certain scenarios, so pick it up today. Jeffrey Zeldman’s ramblings can be found over at his blog.

Eric Meyer on CSS

An essential piece of the web designers library, Eric Meyer on CSS introduces the reader to CSS basics in a way that is extremely easy to understand. The book is organized in tutorial form, introducing the wealth of options available when you style your web pages using CSS. Different CSS properties are introduced randomly throughout the book, so this is in by no means a reference book. It is intended for the beginning CSS designer, walking through examples and showing you how can enhance your pages using CSS. Did you know you can use the text-transform property to uppercase all the text in your navigation? If not, this and many similar examples are are yours to discover. Eric Meyer along with Jeffrey Zeldman founded alistapart.com and launched the sister web design event, An Event Apart. Jeff attended An Event Apart Boston 2008, and got to see Eric speak about CSS frameworks. Eric’s got a ton of useful reference material online, which you can review at his personal site, meyerweb.com.

Simply JavaScript

Filling out the final leg of the modern web designer’s 3-legged footstool, Simply JavaScript is the perfect introduction to a programming language from the perspective of a designer. There are tons of books out there detailing JavaScript, from the entire language documentation to cookbooks of all sizes and flavors. Yet, until Simply JavaScript, never had there been a book that so eloquently presented the language in a fashion that is not only understandable from a designer’s perspective, but its fun too!

Not only do Yank & Adams present the information in a hilarious and easy to understand style, they connect it with the different JavaScript libraries on the market like Prototype, Dojo and MooTools. Complete your XHTML/CSS/JavaScript footstool today by digging into Simply JavaScript!

Check out our full review of Simply JavaScript.

Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook

Web Standards Solutions picks up right where Designing With Web Standards left off. Where Zeldman introduces the theory and the reasoning behind why you should be coding with web standards, Cederholm gets into the nitty-gritty details of how a current web designer or developer puts these theories into practice.

Rich with practical examples, Web Standards Solutions gives you everything you need to work in today’s web world while striving to uphold standards and best practices.

Check out our full review of Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook.