Many people who read this book, “Web Design and Development” (by Kelly Valqui and Eunice Freire), describe it as smooth-flowing, concise, direct, and fantastic. And those who were students of Kelly Valqui regard her as effective: in both teaching and writing. Well, I will not disagree with either. The book is truly a one-stop resource. It offers a set of useful and complete tools (including practical guidance) for anybody who is interested in building website: be it for personal pleasure or for high-traffic e-commerce purposes.
“Web Design and Development” is a less than four hundred pages; yet, it packs power. It harbors complete course in web design, and includes all the essential staples like: HTML, XHTML, and JavaScript. Web design adventurers and/or beginners need not cringe if they encounter these online jargons. The book has already made a mince-meat of them. The early chapters set a logical pace for the book’s entire outlay. They introduced a number of web-design basics, like: How to plan a Website, Project monitoring, and ways of handling Web Quality management.
Other importable features ranged from banner ads to compilable interactive e-commerce site (i.e. existing as part). The book’s "Job Profiles" section and subsections, help to manage quality—via discussed schedules, design costs estimations, and client’s preferences and needs. The authors’ efforts to make Markup Language tutorials seem lively would be appreciated by most readers. The same goes to the exemplary (and easy-to-follow) tagging procedures, which they introduced in the course of explaining the HTML.
Also of great importance to learners are short multiple projects, with which they (the students) are expected to tinker-around with: pending when they cut their teeth. The coherent pictures, which the contents of this text maintained, positively ramified every branch of Web tech. The book is marginally technical—despite its name/title. Therefore, experienced web professionals and code-gurus are bound to criticize it for not going far enough. At the same time, web design newbies would be lamenting about the ‘too many tech stuffs’, which learning from it involved.
Furthermore, the e-commerce coverage of this book is elementary; and fairly vast. Information relating to both software and hardware servers was laid bare. The narratives encourage and showed new learners how to appreciate and design scalable websites, using simple and inexpensive tools. Even design tricks, which surround shopping carts, as well as e-commerce sites’ attributes, were gradually unmasked. Subtle insight on how to take advantage of XML (i.e. eXtensible Markup Language), as platform-independent resource was evident. In the same fashion, the structural importance of CSS (Cascading Style-Sheet) was unveiled—without needing any sort of web programming.
Meanwhile, the inclusion of reusable cliparts, cut-and-paste design templates, JavaScript-oriented games, and frame templates banner ads (as part of its CD-ROM resource), will continue to be appreciated. The same applies to pieces of advice regarding debuggings, tweakings, and how best to apply each type of performance tuning option. All these would go a long way in helping to build, service, and sustain a multilingual data-driven website.
In conclusion, I would say that this textbook is not at all bad. It harbors generous amount of good contents. However, the fact that it has not been revised and/or updated since 2001 is worrisome. This is because Web Design and Development procedures are still in their infancy. So, as they rapidly evolve and develop, they would need equally rapidly updating authors, who would keep their contents accurate and current.
VALENTINE ODUENYI.
