Home > Archives > Books

Monday, Jul 7 2008

Web forms are the one thing that consistently stand between the customer and the product, as well as between companies and their profits. If the web form proves successful, the customer receives his product and the company, their money. Yet, if the form isn’t successful, the company can bet that they have not only lost revenue, but a customer as well.

Thanks to a new book published by Rosenfeld Media, Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks, author and Senior Principal of Product Ideation & Design at Yahoo! Inc. Luke Wroblewski lays out the basic principles needed to apply toward the right design solutions for your web forms.

Wednesday, Jul 2 2008

Quantifying design is a concept that many consider blasphemous. Yet, we realize that the value of design is under scrutiny. Often we are asked “what is the value of good design?” or “how much does good design cost?” As we know, ‘good design’ is subjective and can vary greatly, depending upon your organization, audience and product.

To better understand what ‘good design’ is, it’s best to evaluate if your design is fulfilling the needs of its users. To help simplify the process and to outline useful design strategies, the folks at Rosenfeld Media offer Mental Models: Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior.

Tuesday, Jul 1 2008

We told you at the beginning of April of the upcoming release of Andrew Connell’s book on SharePoint. Well we finally found it available at almost all book retailers.

Called Professional SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management Development: Building Publishing Sites with Office SharePoint Server 2007, the 456 page book published by John Wiley and Sons is the only book known to cover the Web Content Management aspects of SharePoint in detail.

Andrew is a big proponent of SharePoint’s ability to create highly engaging web content management sites and this book is his attempt to sell us all on it’s potential.

Chapters in the book cover everything from master pages and page layouts, to content types, navigation, accessibility, workflow, content deployment and a lot more.

Oddly enough, the book comes at a time when we hear more about SharePoint’s collaboration capabilities than its content management. It seems like lately we don’t talk too much about what SharePoint can do from a web content management standpoint. Now that’s either because we’ve finally all settled on the fact that it isn’t quite there yet, or we are just way too caught up in this whole social computing discussion where Microsoft seems determined that SharePoint is a leader.

In either case, this is a book I would personally like to read, especially considering it’s coming from someone who has dedicated his career to learning and understanding how SharePoint works from a web content management perspective.

If a book isn’t enough for you, Andrew is set to teach some WCM courses — both online and in person over the next couple of months on SharePoint and Web Content Management.

Wednesday, Jun 18 2008

Our friends at eZ Publish are coming at you with their latest offering, eZ Publish Advanced Content Management. It’s a book that caters to the needs of content managers and webmasters, offering a comprehensive and advanced guide to managing content with open source eZ Publish Enterprise CMS.

Friday, Jun 6 2008

If you are one of those developers who likes both Microsoft and open source, then you are probably already familiar with the DotNetNuke application framework. If you are then Packt Publishing has just released a book you might be interested in called DotNetNuke Skinning Tutorial.

Tuesday, Apr 29 2008

Have we learned all we need to know about Web 2.0 and how it impacts our organizations? O’Reilly thinks not and so has decided to enlighten us with a new book on the subject: Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide — Business Thinking and Strategies Behind Successful Web 2.0 Implementations

Wednesday, Apr 23 2008

Spend forty-five minutes with Steve Souders and you too can have Even Faster Web Sites. That’s the plan anyway.

O’Reilly Media presents a free webcast with the author of High Performance Web Sites and former Chief Performance Yahoo!, Steve Souders.

The book High Performance Web Sites is based around the 14 most important rules that Souder discovered during his research and work on site optimization. If these rules are followed, he claims they can chip 25 to 50 percent off the response time when users request a page. Souder’s techniques have improved the functionality of such sites as Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! Front Page.

Now at Google, Souders has been busy working on a new set of best practices to make web sites zoom, zoom fast. Benefiting from his extensive background in web performance, participants will learn about the Performance Golden Rule, review his performance best practices and watch how YSlow, the performance analysis extension to Firebug, analyzes the top web sites in the world.

Joined by Andy Oram, author, blogger, and senior editor for O’Reilly Media, the webcast is sure to lend a hand in helping attendees harnessing the efficiency of their web sites.

The webcast is scheduled for Thursday, April 24 at 10 a.m. PST. Register today!

Thursday, Apr 17 2008

I love style guides. As a designer, writer and Jane-of-all-trades, it’s helpful to know what fonts to use, color palettes to incorporate and abbreviations and acronyms to follow. And yet, as the Web has evolved through its many iterations, we web journalists (and our beloved editors) have relied consistently on style guides developed primarily for print.

Wired.com seeks to change that.

Wednesday, Apr 16 2008

Drupal 6 was released in February, which means there’s a lot more learning to do for users adopting this latest CMS platform. Luckily, the folks at Packt Publishing are on it with their update to David Mercer’s best selling Drupal 4.7 book: “Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6”.

Tuesday, Apr 1 2008

If you are a religious SharePoint follower then you’ve heard of Andrew Connell — known best as the expert on Web Content Management with SharePoint 2007.

Well Andrew and a team of other SharePoint experts have been hard at work writing a new book: Professional Professional SharePoint 2007 Web Content Management Development: Building Publishing Sites with Office SharePoint Server 2007 and it’s finally finished and getting ready for publication.

The book is aimed at developers who build publishing sites with SharePoint 2007 — something many believe is not easy. WCM is considered one of the weakest components of SharePoint. Andrew may argue this as he’s spent lots of time working on it, training people on it, talking about it at conferences. So this book should be the answer to many a dream…

A quick scan of the table content reveals much about the information that will be provided in the book. Some of the Chapters include:

• Embarking on Web Content Management Projects
• Minimal Publishing Site Definition
• Site Columns, Content Types and Lists
• Navigation
• Accessibility
• Leveraging Workflow
• Authoring Experience Extensibility
• Authentication and Authorization
• Implementing Sites with Multiple Languages and Devices
• Content Deployment

Definitely sounds like a book I’d like to read. You can preorder on Amazon or sit back and impatiently wait for the June release.

Friday, Mar 28 2008

Speaking of Packt Publishing, Safari Books Online, provider of digital libraries, announced an agreement with the publishing company to make Packt’s books and other technical publications available online to corporate and individual library subscribers.

As Packt Publishing’s first online channel distribution partner, Safari Books Online hopes to enable its subscribers to benefit from access to one of the most comprehensive lists of copyrighted works on open source technologies.

Packt (pronounced Packed), published its first book in April 2004. From then on, they began to publish books on specific technologies and solutions, allowing developers and administrators to adapt and customize today’s systems, applications and frameworks.

Their dedication to open source has been apparent through their awards for “The Best Open Source CMS”, and their numerous books covering the ins and outs of a number of open source technologies and content management systems like eZ Publish and osCommerce.

And now their dedication to Open Source goes even further.