Name: Bulletproof Web Design
ISBN: 9780321509024

What Hacker News says

remiJul 2022

Reminds me of the classic CSS book (2005?) by Dan Cederholm: https://www.amazon.com/Bulletproof-Web-Design-flexibility-pr...

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claviskaDec 2021

This reminds me of Dan Cederholm’s Bulletproof Web Design, which coincidentally inspired me to adapt the paradigm to component development earlier this week.

https://www.abeautifulsite.net/posts/bulletproof-components/

Randomizing content is a great technique to test for this.

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rimantasAug 2016

Anyone remembers Dan Cederholm (http://www.simplebits.com/) and his excellent books "Web Standards Solutions" and "Bulletproof Web Design"? He even had a series of exercises like this on his blog. Oh, the gone days of the web which was a web and not some misfit wannabe app engine :(

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impJul 2011

For HTML/CSS, Bulletproof Web Design is a great book. It doesn't get into graphical design though.

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arkitaipMay 2011

IMHO you first need to understand design, its various sub fields (i.e. typography, colors, layout), user experience design/interaction design/usability, and finally how all of this applies to the web. You can learn the basics by reading books but the only way to truly understand and master is by study this things in the world and by practicing them. Start thinking about design, analyze it in your daily life, do your own makeovers of sites you use, design a blog theme, etc, etc.

As for web typography, you want to check of the latest generation of font embedding because that's where the real magic's at. The most known web font solutions are: CSS3 (font-face), typeface.js, cufon, flir, sifr, Google Font API, Typekit.

Here's a list of quality books on design and typography:

    A History of Graphic Design
    Before & After Page Design
    Designing Brand Identity
    Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things
    Graphic Design Solutions
    How Designers Think
    Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data
    Making and Breaking the Grid: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop 
    The Complete Manual of Typography
    The Designer's Guide to Color Combinations
    The Elements of Graphic Design: Space, Unity, Page Architecture, and Type
    The Elements of Typographic Style
    The New Typography
    The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
    Thinking with Type: A Primer for Designers
    Typography Workbook: A Real-World Guide to Using Type in Graphic Design

Books on web design:

    About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design
    Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become  
    Bulletproof Web Design
    Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide
    Designing Web Usability
    Designing With Web Standards
    Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design
    Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction
    Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
    Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed
    Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites
    Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web  
    Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction
    Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems
    The Essential Guide to User Interface Design
    The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
    Thoughtful Interaction Design: A Design Perspective on Information Technology
    Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks

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dylanhassingerMay 2011

RE: Picking your axe

Your wish list is all over the place. It would help to pick one of the goals listed (i.e. Ruby, or Node, or Python) and hone in on that. Once you figure out what language you want to learn, devour everything on the topic from these sources: * Peepcode tutorials * Slideshare slideshows * Youtube videos or other longform tutorials

Get a Hello World example running in your new language, and then see if you can get it wired up to a database. Congrats, now you're up and running...

It's not sexy or new, but the book the Pragmatic Programmer is the bible on how to become a good programmer and not just a hack.

RE: How to build a web app - read Getting Real by 37signals, this will give you a nice high level approach. This is also a great introduction to agile development principles.

"but I never really have an itch to scratch" sounds like you're not brainstorming hard enough. Even in your post there's the seeds of many different itches. Find the most basic thing you trip over every day, and write a tiny tiny software tool to fix that problem.

Last but not least, sounds like you could use some more experience with front-end concepts. I recommend Bulletproof Web Design by Dan Cederholm as a great overview.

Technology moves too fast for anybody to keep up, just do your best and always keep learning! Good luck

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