This concise book (149 pages) uses Ruby to teach basic programming; a good book for total green-horns to programming. But keep in mind this book is not titled: ‘Learn to Program Ruby’.

What I mean by that, is that the book targets new programmers, not programmers new to Ruby. So it may be a little slow for some people (experienced programmers) when the author (for example,) explains what an array is …

WHAT MAKES THIS BOOK INTERESTING

The book is well written and the flows well, but what I find interesting about it is:

• It uses Ruby to teach programming.
• It teaches some interesting concepts that you might not read in say, a PHP book.

Ruby is the hot new language in the geek world, but it has yet to show itself substantially in commercial application. That said, it is an interesting language choice for this kind of book: Ruby is a terse and easy to use language, and I think this allowed for the author to jump into concepts like recursion and procs – I like this.

CONCLUSION

A good book that is not so pragmatic, in that you don’t see the typical how to build a shopping cart project at the end.

Instead, the author concentrates on basic programming concepts and leaves it to another book to expose the reader to real-life application.

I would use this book in a programming 101 type of class.

‘CSS Mastery’ covers the most sought after CSS concepts, tips and techniques. It’s a must-have book for any intermediate level web designer because of the way it covers the material: it is concise, clear and pragmatic.

Just when you’re finished learning one great CSS technique, you turn the page and bing-bang, there’s another juicy one to jump into! A nice change from the zealot batherings I’ve had to endure in other books on the subject!

Like all the books from this publisher, it is also well put together physically:

• Good layout
• Good choice of paper
• Easy to read font
• Not too thick or thin
• Good use of graphics/diagrams

The publisher (Friends of Ed,) have done a great job with their web design books lately; ‘CSS Mastery’ along with Dan Cederholm’s book (Web Standards Solutions) are the best out there today.

I have yet to read ‘Web Designer’s Reference’ by Cederholm, but I hear it’s good too.

Stefan Mischook (Web Design Heretic)

Welcome to the world of modern web design!

This is a very good book on blogs. OK, so why should web designers want to read a book on installing and customizing popular blogs?

The anwer: web designers today, NEED to learn how to work with blogs. Blog implementation (installing, customizing, skinning) is a growing part of the web design business these days and is now an essential tool in the web designers toolbox.

Blog Design Solutions gives you a to-the-point tour of several important blogging engines:

• Moveable Type
• TextPattern
• ExpressionEngine
• WordPress

The is a multi-author book where each blog is given its due by one or more authors – as such, you know that each blog is covered by people who know what they’re doing.

Along the way, you will also pick up tips about Flikr integration, blog syndication and other things that this old time web designer may have not been ‘up to snuff’ on.

I use WordPress, and so I immediately jumped to that chapter; I found the writing to be clear, and the author covered topics that I wanted to read about. I am not a user of the other blog engines, but I’m glad that the book covers them for sake of comparison – it’s always good to know about competing products.

Beyond covering the blogs, the last chapter actually takes you step-by-step through the process of creating a blog from scratch using PHP. I went through the code, and enjoyed the way the author runs through the process – you’ll might also pick up a few PHP ideas along the way.

I recommend this book to any web designer who has the intention of earning a living in web design.

Stefan Mischook (The Web Design Heretic)

One of the key components of running a successful web design business (any business really,) is to manage your money effectively.

Most businesses go out of business, simply because they don’t follow some basic money management rules. The following are my ‘Killer Money Management Rules’.

Top 6 Killer Money Management Rules

1. Credit cards are for transactions only – not for carrying debt. Pay off your entire balance every month!

2. If you can’t buy something cash, don’t buy it.

3. If your bank account is not increasing every month, it’s time to go into crisis mode.

4. You should have a stash of ‘fcuk-you’ cash … one years worth. So, if you spend $2000/month to live, you should have $24 000 in the stash. The stash should be held in a no risk, immediate access account like an ING account.

5. Never touch your emergency stash unless it’s an emergency. Having this stash makes you sleep well at night. I call it ‘fcuk-you cash’ because when you know you will be fine for a year, you can tell idiot clients to … you get the idea.

6. Create a separate retirement account/investments that you pay into regularly and first – this is a ‘never touch’ account.

Lots of business owners pile all their funds in one place (as I did) and then end up broke at 55. Fortunately for me, I learned these lessons young.

As some of you may know, I have been against using CSS hacks for a long while.

Now that IE7 is coming out very soon and we know that many CSS hacks will break in IE7, we need to come up with another viable solution to make CSS based layouts work in IE6, and the other more capable browsers …

That’s where IE conditional comments come in. This IE specific code/tool is safe and solves all our problems when creating cross browser pure CSS layouts.

Check out the video: IE Conditional Comments