Rating: 
Summary: Fantastic layout, indespensible design tips.
Review: This book really impressed me. I've read many web design books and out of them all, this has been one of the most valuable and rewarding. The colorful illustrations and useful real-world examples enhanced the material a lot. But that is to be expected of a book on this subject. The thing that impressed me most was how the authors somehow managed to take the most important aspects of web design and the most useful techniques and fit them all in a nutshell of less than 300 pages. The way this book progresses is excellent. It starts off with classic HTML, then goes on to site navigation including the incredibly useful rollOver effects and client-side image maps followed by coverage of graphics and colors. All of these areas alone were enough to drastically improve the way I approach desiging my websites and make purchasing this book worthwhile. What this book does is give you a whole new mindset about what good web design really is by talking about practices that work and those that don't and reiterating their points through helpful real-world examples. The reason I have given this book 4 stars rather than 5 is because of it's second part. I feel that chapter 8 tried too hard to be almost a Dynamic HTML tutorial rather than an overview of the important subjects which they had been excelling in doing all along. I think that the DHTML coverage became too detailed and specific at certain points. If you want a complete tutorial on DHTML, I strongly reccomend Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Resource by Danny Goodman. All in all, I feel that Mrs. Ibanez and Mrs. Zee did a superb job at cutting the fat and getting to the important stuff so that you could instantly become a smarter web designer. I strongly reccomend that you buy this book.
Rating:
Summary: This is one of those "web design inspiration" books
Review: This is not really a book for learning HTML or Javascript or any of the tools used to create the sites profiled, and it's not a reference book either. Rather, it's a book for getting inspiration on innovative ways of doing things. Other books in this category include "Click Here" by Raymond Pirouz, "Web Design Studio Secrets", and probably the original one of this type, "Killer Websites" and its second edition by David Siegel. All books of this type tend to be opinionated but perhaps this one is a bit less obvious than some others. However it's important to keep in mind that it's the authors that selected the sites to include. And of course everyone has a different opinion as to what constitutes good, innovative design. So the question is...what can you get from books like this that you can't get from surfing around and viewing the source code of sites you like? Well, this book does include lots of sample code and some useful appendices, and the instruction parts are quite clear. Most of all it leads you to sites you may not have been aware of that are pushing the design envelope on the web. Last but not least, it's quite well written. It's probably most useful to intermediate + web designers.
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