Web Site Cookbook: A Thin But Nourishing Dish
People seem to keep pointing me to domains of activity that I had no idea existed. Most recently my son introduced me to the subculture devoted to the cult of Chuck Norris, as expressed by this snippet of machinima using the Elder Scrolls: Oblivian engine. Who knew? The thing is, we don't know what we don't know. We rely on others to say, "Hey, look over here, you need to know this." It's on that principle that O'Reilly's venerable "cookbook" series is based, using a question-solution-discussion format the publisher has applied to a wide of development and graphics topics.
I've been going through Doug Addison's Web Site Cookbook, and while it wasn't the ideal such book for me, having been involved in site development for over a decade, I can see two groups for whom it would have value: those using a hosted blog service who have decided to make the big move by building and managing their own site, as well as designers who are (often hesitantly) moving into the technical aspects of building and running a site.
The book doesn't deal with the design side but rather provides dozens of tech solutions, most of them fairly straightforward, to such questions as: how do I create a browser Favicon, display breadcrumb navigation links, employ server-side includes to display variable data, or control subdirectory access via .htaccess files? Even something as rudimentary as knowing how to make a site accessible to those entering its address minus the leading www is handy stuff for those just getting started. More daunting will be dealing with the frequent PHP and JavaScript snippets, but many of these are of the copy and paste variety and can be tweaked relatively easily, providing a good introduction to the code-based aspects of managing a real site.
My only quibble is the length: at 261 pages it's simply too short. The index also seemed skimpy for a book of this nature. But other than that, if you fit the profile, this should help solve some problems and teach you some new tricks.
Web Site Cookbook
Doug Addison
Published by O'Reilly, $39.99
Chris Dickman
Editor, Graphics.com
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