Every once in awhile I enjoy just picking up a book on a topic I’m not so familiar with and discovering something new.  The XML Visual QuickStart Guide series (second edition) is one I recently chose to work through.  If you’re familiar with the Visual Quickstart Series then you probably know that the layout of the book is very straightforward, easy to read, and has great examples on nearly every page of the book.  This title is no exception.

I was the most hands on with the first few chapters, creating XML and XSLT files and also working through the XQUERY examples.  This gave me a great overview of XML, but it also left me with the awareness that there is so much more to explore.

The book continues to touch upon XSL-FO, DTDs, Schemas and Namespaces.  I wasn’t quite ready to dive into these topics yet, but I noted that the overviews of these chapters were a nice quick reference if I needed it in the future.

The last few chapters go into more depth with XSLT 2.0, XPATH 2.0 and XQUERY 1.0.  These are the newest W3C recommendations for these languages, but it’s noted at the beginning of the book that XSLT 1.0 and XPATH 1.0 are still in use, so the beginning examples are in the older versions.

The last chapter gives a flavor of XML in practice with very brief examples of Ajax, RSS, SOAP, and others.  It’s just an overview of how powerful XML is and just how much it is used in conjunction with these other technologies.  Of course several more volumes can be filled with these topics, so in my case, when I get the desire to learn something new again, at least I have a good list and jumping off point in the last chapter.

This book is recommended if you’re new to XML, or if you just want a basic reference to guide you along.

• Title: XML: Visual QuickStart Guide (2nd Edition)
• Author: Kevin Howard Goldberg
• Publisher: Peachpit Press
• ISBN: 0321559673
• Date: 2008
• Format: Softcover
• Pages: 288
• Cover: Price USD: $34.99

What I appreciate about Jason Beaird’s book The Principles of Beautiful Web Design is the simplicity with which he tackles each topic. He begins with the client interview, advising to focus on client needs and making them feel at ease.

It’s good advice to use a pad of paper instead of a laptop to record notes in a meeting, but the more important thing to derive is that body language is an important part of the trust-building process of a customer relationship.

Personally, I’m a big proponent of the Golden Ratio, so seeing a good basic explanation of it early in the work was a big plus. He then proceeded through all the basics of design in a very common-sense way.

The typography section appears the most information-packed, and seems obsessively-detailed compared to the rest of the sections. In fact, I could almost imagine the author talking about fonts like Bubba in Forrest Gump talked about shrimp!

Altogether, this book is a very good basic primer on design for the screen. It covers all the topics — though not comprehensively in any case — and presents them in a very understandable way.

The examples serve the text very well, and as you’d expect from a design book, everything looks good to fit its function. If I didn’t know all of this already, I’d be happy to have learned it from this guide.

I will recommend this book to any friends interested in the topic, as well as to patrons at the library I work at (which incidentally already has a copy!) who may happen to ask about the subject.

The title of this book Beginning Spring 2: From Novice to Professional may be a bit misleading.  I think if you are new to Spring and especially if you are new to Java frameworks in general, you would have a hard time with this book.  This is not a how do you build a Spring application type book as I was expecting.  After reading several chapters I still didn’t really know how to get started, and I have years of experience with Java and the Struts framework.  The author does a fair job of explaining the benefits of Struts in a theoretical way, but the concrete examples seem disconnected and difficult to apply.  There is no “Hello World” type example that explains how to get a simple Spring application up an running.

The book does contain some good examples once you are familiar with Spring, so this book may be more beneficial for experienced Spring developers.  If you are a true beginner, this may not be the book for you.

• Title: Beginning Spring 2: From Novice to Professional
• Author: Dave Minter
• Publisher: Apress
• ISBN: 1590596854
• Date: 2007
• Format: Softcover
• Pages: 271
• Cover Price: USD: $39.99

Author, Gene Smith begins this book with a quote by Jon Udell, “When the novelty wears off, I think that tagging will have altered the information landscape in a fundamental way.” The original quote was first published in an InfoWorld article, titled Tag Mania Sweeps the Web, in 2005. I believe there is a lot of truth to the original quote, now in 2009, tagging is common in sites like Flickr or Delicious, and it seems nearly every new web application has some form of social tagging included. For students of Library and Information Science (like myself) this is indeed an important topic because it surely has “altered the information landscape – but thankfully this debate, which is better left in the LIS classroom, is not in Gene Smith’s book and instead he gives the reader a clear overview and practical guide of what tagging is and examples of how it is used in the context of web development.

Gene Smith is a principal at the company nForm, a user experience consulting firm in Edmonton, Canada. According to Smith’s personal website, Atomiq, the company is devoted to making their clients’ websites and interactive software better for the end users by doing customer research, information architecture, and creating effective prototypes. Smith’s interest in tagging (and the discussion that lead to the semantics) began in 2004 when he asked a simple question to the Information Architecture Institute mailing list inquiring whether there was a name for this type of user classification. He explains in the introduction that this book is a guide to the what and how (and sometimes why) of tagging, using real-world examples based on his research.

Smith explains that this is not a philosophical discussion of why people tag but more of a practical guide to what it is and how information architects, developers, and designers can implement tagging into their own websites. It is a comprehensive overview starting with the definition and value of tagging. The technical aspects of this book include a chapter on the architecture and technical design, but Smith did not overlook what tagging is at its core – that is, metadata which is also used as navigational elements in websites. The information architecture aspect of tagging is presented in a chapter devoted to interface design.

The book is structured very concisely with a simple and clear writing style. The chapters are arranged by topic and with many examples of screenshots, tables, and some sample code. Information is easy to find and practical. I believe the simple outline style of the book is a benefit, as with many subjects devoted to technology, the topic will likely evolve and change, while many of the websites will be redesigned in time so the screenshots will help the reader become oriented with the topics more easily.

At the moment, Smith’s book is the only definitive and clear guide to tagging available. Many recent publications discuss tagging in the context of Web 2.0 (for example, Joshua Porter’s, Designing for the Social Web, or Clay Shirky’s book, Here Comes Everybody: the Power of Organizing without Organizations) but they are not devoted entirely to tagging. There have been a few studies devoted to the practice of tagging, but Smith did not set out to write a book about user motivations for tagging, so his overview stands alone when compared to other literature on this topic. One criticism of the book though is that it does not have a convenient set of resources or links available for reference or further reading. Web links are included, but within the text, which makes it difficult to find a website easily if a reader wanted to refer to it again later.

Information architects are interested in how information is structured on a website, and as Smith puts it, are often tasked with developing organization schemes that work for a diverse population of users (p. 13). This underlines the importance of an understanding in tagging systems to information architects as they need to be aware of how users of a website are to find information while they are there. While tagging is not the only method IAs have for employing a classification or navigation system to a website, if the opportunity warrants itself for use in a such a system, it should be of interest for them understand how tagging can be used and engaged.

Smith’s book is recommended for information architects, web designers, and librarians who are interested in putting tagging into practice on their websites. The visualizations and concise outline make this book easy to read and refer to again. It is a practical guide for anybody who is unfamiliar with how tagging works and would like to know more.

• Title: Tagging: People Powered Metadata for the Social Web
• Author: Gene Smith
• Publisher: New Riders
• ISBN: 9780321529176
• Date: 2008
• Format: Softcover
• Pages: 208
• Cover Price: USD: $39.99

What makes “Building Findable Websites: Web Standards, SEO, and Beyond” by Aarron Walter so interesting to me is the simple, easy-to-implement advice. In fact, I updated the Refresh Detroit WordPress setup with several recommendations from the book.

Aarron covers a wide range of areas in the book, including user experience, markup, search engine optimization, and site promotion, that some people may find distracting.

However, I liked the mix of technical advice, delving into server-side settings and development and WordPress tweaking, and the more practical tips on creating content and setting up mailing lists. As Aarron points out in the first chapter, developing a findable website is the result of many aspects in web development which help your target audience find the information they seek.

It may seem a small detail, but an added bonus of the book is how the book is laid out and formatted, improving readability:

• the book lays flat with wide width pages
• the line spacing is generous, and
• the excellent use of text color in main content, chapter and section headings

As the sole employee of a web development company, I wear several hats as marketer, information architect, designer, coder, developer and search engine optimization analyst. Aarron’s book is a great resource for improving website findability by improving the user experience.

• Title: Building Findable Websites, first edition
• Author: Aarron Walter
• Publisher: New Riders Press
• ISBN: 0321526287
• Date: 2008
• Format: Softcover
• Pages: 240
• Cover Price: USD: $39.99

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