35 Free Web Design Ebooks / Resources (Part 2 of 3)
HTML, CSS, Flash, Web Usability, Layouts, Typography, User Interface, Javascript and many more…
These ebooks include:-
- HTML and CSS Tutorials, References, and Articles – htmldog.com
- Flazoom.com – Developing User-Friendly Flash Content – flazoom.com
- A Hitchhikers Guide to the Obvious: Web Usability 101 – squiz.co.uk
- Getting Real – gettingreal.37signals.com
- Mosaic Layouts: How And Why To Avoid Creating Puzzle-Looking Websites – softwaretalks.com
- KnockKnock: Seth Godin’s Incomplete Guide to Building a Web Site that Works – sethgodin.typepad.com
- The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web – A Practical Guide To Web Typography – webtypography.net
- Search User Interfaces – searchuserinterfaces.com
- The Woork Handbook – woork.blogspot.com
- Web Designers Success Guide: How To Profit From Freelance Web Design – airgid.com
- Eloquent JavaScript: A Modern Introduction to Programming – eloquentjavascript.net
- Practicing Ruby – blog.rubybestpractices.com
Missed out the first part (1 of 3)?
No worries, just click on the link below to jump straight to the first compilation of this 3 part series:-
Bonus!
These are some of the resources that we’ve posted in the past which we believe will compliment this compilation very nicely:-
- Cheat Sheets – You Just Can’t Live Without Them
- Over 90 Free GIMP & Photoshop Ebooks, Cheat Sheets & Tutorials
- 10+ Free CSS Ebooks
HTML and CSS Tutorials, References, and Articles
by htmldog.com
The site boasts of offering all the free resources for web designers on the most common techniques in developing HTML and CSS web pages. It has free guides and tutorials, references, articles, and examples. You also get a short endorsement of the ‘HTML Dog Book’ by Patrick Griffiths and published by New Riders which you can purchase and download from Amazon and other online eBook stores.
The site has six exhaustive tutorials for novice, intermediate and advance HTML and CSS web designers. These are listed on the left frame and clicking on one brings you to the content page and opens the chapters in the left frame. Navigation to the next and previous pages is easy as each page contains these navigational commands.
The reference section contains two main topics on HTML tags and CSS properties. Clicking on either section brings you to an index of all the parameters in bulleted listing, each one providing the applicable values, attributes and examples as well as related topics and tutorials.
Clicking on the articles open up a bulleted listing of topics that further explain some of the major tutorial topics classified as novice, intermediate and advanced, as well as related topics in the tutorial and reference sections. Lastly, clicking on the examples section reveals a wealth of bare-bone HTML and CSS page construction for text, images, links, layout, lists, tables and forms.
Click on the link below to view or download this free ebook:-
HTML and CSS Tutorials, References, and Articles
Flazoom.com – Developing User-Friendly Flash Content
by flazoom.com
With its objective to share the best Flash sites and how to create fantastic Flash pages, the Flazoom site features a white paper on ‘developing User-Friendly Flash Content.’ The free document provides web developers with the skills and the proper focus to design and implement a user-friendly Macromedia Flash site. The focus here is on usability which the Macromedia Flash application provides to create a rewarding user experience online.
The 15-page text-heavy white paper in eBook format is relatively short with just 5 main chapters and a few sub chapters in each which are linked to their relevant pages. Most pages occupy just a screen while a few will require some scrolling. Navigation is quick as each page has the ‘back’, ‘next’ and ‘table of Content’ commands. The default text size is small but your browser can zoom in for those with visual acuity problems. The site also provides a formatted page for the paper which you can print directly. There are no downloading options as the site offers the white paper as an eBook you can read online. You can save each page once displayed using your browser’s ‘save page as’ file command but you can’t use the navigational commands when reading offline.
Click on the link below to view or download this free ebook:-
Flazoom.com – Developing User-Friendly Flash Content
A Hitchhikers Guide to the Obvious: Web Usability 101
by squiz.co.uk
The Squiz Web Experience Management site’s UK version offers the white paper ‘A Hitchhikers Guide to the Obvious: Web Usability 101’ which talks about the challenges creating web pages that deliver a satisfying online user experience. The entire paper occupies just a page, as do all the other white papers in the site. But unlike some white papers that offer a PDF download option, this guide offers none. But good thing the entire white paper is just on one page so you can use your browser’s ‘save page as’ facility to get the page to your hard disk for offline reading.
The Guide has one of the most image-rich white papers online and is more of a white paper than a reference guide. These images are mostly full screen shots of current websites and relevant parts of it that serve as examples to further illustrate the points made and case studies discussed in the paper. The paper posits three general rules on achieving practical usability for websites complete with screenshot examples of what you can do towards this end. To amateur and professional site builders, the paper offers a wealth of insights from a professional design company that are sure to help them in enhancing their current website projects or crafting new more user-centric websites.
Click on the link below to view or download this free ebook:-
A Hitchhikers Guide to the Obvious: Web Usability 101
Getting Real
by gettingreal.37signals.com
The Getting Real book by the team 37 Signals has sold more than 30,000 copies at $19 online and still selling well including its paperback version at $25. But you can get the 16 chapters and 93 essay articles free online at the site of the same name. These are the three options the site has to get the book. It even comes in 19 translations like Arabic, Cutch, Italian, Japanese, Russian, etc., though the site cautions that not all translations are complete.
The site download page starts with a product endorsement for the book, its relevance, what to expect and a background about the Chicago-based 37 Signals company that wrote the book. The page also mentions the other products of the company. Clicking on the 3rd option for a free online reading access brings you to the page containing the eBook’s table of contents where you get the sub-chapters (the chapters are just groupings) linked to their relevant pages. Each sub-chapter occupies a single HTML page that allows you to navigate to the next sub-chapter, the table of contents and a list of essays related to the chapter, but it has no back or previous page facility. You just have to use the browser’s back navigation button for the purpose.
Click on the link below to view or download this free ebook:-
Getting Real
Mosaic Layouts: How And Why To Avoid Creating Puzzle-Looking Websites
by softwaretalks.com
Software Talks is an excellent blog site dating back to Dec 2005. It features a wide collection of useful applications and is home to articles on data management, internet scams and web development. The latter category has this practical article ‘mosaic Layout’: How and Why to Avoid Creating Puzzle-looking Websites’ and discusses web page loading in user PCs based on the number of elements a web designer puts into a page. It article provides some helpful tips, especially to novice web designers eager to make an impressive webpage on how to create a fast loading website which can create a better surfing experience for your visitors.
It may be just an article but it can serve as a useful reference guide for web designers who often go overboard spicing up their web designs with so many design elements that hamper loading. Thankfully enough, the site allows you to download of the two-page article as a PDF file so it can serves as a reference reading material offline. The site provides a brief on the Authors Jonathan Tunn and Alexander Grasmik who also appears in the PDF download. Typical of most blog sites, you also get a few visitor comments about the article.
Click on the link below to view or download this free ebook:-
Mosaic Layouts: How And Why To Avoid Creating Puzzle-Looking Websites
KnockKnock: Seth Godin’s Incomplete Guide to Building a Web Site that Works
by sethgodin.typepad.com
Writer Seth Grodin’s blog site on this page features his free eBook intriguingly titled ‘KnockKnock: Seth Godin’s Incomplete Guide to Building a Web Site that Works’ which the writer had earlier published and sold online for $9. The book is a collection of insights based on his hands-on experience in developing websites and is written in candid informal tone. He asks his readers not to buy the book since he is now offering free on his blog. Seth also promises to post the other sites that host the eBook as well as a sequel soon, presumably also for free.
The 41-page eBook is graphics and image heavy and is authored in landscape presentation format, rather than with the usually word processing one, taking up more than 8 Mb file size. You can access and read the eBook online from a hyperlinked text ‘Here’s the file’ with a caution that the file is huge. It does take some time to download the file possibly due to the server bandwidth limitation, enough to take a coffee break. There are no direct download buttons on the blog but you can use the Adobe Reader’s save file option to get it to your PC for offline reading.
Click on the link below to view or download this free ebook:-
KnockKnock: Seth Godin’s Incomplete Guide to Building a Web Site that Works
The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web – A Practical Guide To Web Typography
by webtypography.net
The site is dedicated to the eBook ‘the Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web’ by Robert Bringhurst and is considered a must have classic reference material that no serious web designer should miss, whether amateur or professional. The site couldn’t be any simpler and more straightforward. The home page is just the book cover containing the title with the Introduction, content page and a latest updates linked to the inner pages.
Clicking on the Table of Content brings you to the content page revealing just three chapters, including the introduction which is directly accessible form the home page. The two other chapters are just topic groups and the meat goes to the sub-topics which are linked to their respective pages. Once you get to a page, there are no ‘next’ and ‘previous’ navigational commands but the page has a persistent right column containing the link to the table of contents. You can just use your browser’s back button to go to the content page. There is no download option as the entire site is the eBook itself. But you can use the ‘save As’ command of your browser to put each page on your PC for offline reading.
Click on the link below to view or download this free ebook:-
The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web – A Practical Guide To Web Typography
Search User Interfaces
by searchuserinterfaces.com
This ‘search User Interface’ by Marti A. Hearst and published by the Cambridge University Press in 2009 is considered by many pundits in internet marketing as among the best SEO books in the industry. It presents state of the art search interface design based on real commercial search ‘optimized web deployments and academic research. The site of the same name features a home page with several reviews about the book, along with a brief about the author and a blog site for readers to discuss and comment on the contents of the book.
More importantly, the homepage has a section for readers to access the eBook contents in its entirety free of charge. Clicking on the hyperlinked ‘read It’ under the Free Access section on the right window column brings you to the content page with 12 chapters, reference, index and errata sections linked to their respective pages. Each chapter has a short description and clicking on any of the chapter brings you to the chapter contents where the sub topics and their contents are contained in just one page. So be prepared to scroll a long way down to finish the chapter. There are no navigational keys to get you to the next chapter or back but the book chapter listing on the rightmost column allows you to just click on the next chapter to continue reading. There are no download options, though you can save the page to your PC using your browser’s save page facility.
Click on the link below to view or download this free ebook:-
Search User Interfaces
The Woork Handbook
by woork.blogspot.com
The ‘Woork Handbook’ is a free eBook about CSS, HTML, Ajax, web programming, Mootools, Scriptaculous and other topics about web design. The handbook is actually a compilation of blog articles written by Antonio Lupetti between January and December 2008 and organized over 8 chapters. It is structured to contain the article text along with web page codes, illustrations, images and links to related and supporting resources in the Woork site.
You have the option download the 188-page eBook in its entirety and current version as a 4.5 Mb PDF file. There are two ways to go about it. On the page is a download button, but the server site is not always available and you could get ‘the user hosting this content is out of bandwidth’ at certain times of the day. The other way is through the online reading tool Scribd which has a command menu at the bottom, whether zoomed full page or not, containing a download button. It only takes a minute to two to get it to your PC as a PDF file. You need to be a little forgiving though, since the author is an Italian and the English language is anything but flawless.
Click on the link below to view or download this free ebook:-
The Woork Handbook
Web Designers Success Guide: How To Profit From Freelance Web Design
by airgid.com
The single page Airgid.com site is the online portal to the eBook ‘Web Designer’s Success Guide’ which you can download as a free PDF file. You can’t miss it since the download prompt is prominently displayed on the first line of the site. The download takes a few minutes and gets displayed on your browser window if you have Acrobat Reader add-on. Just click on the reader’s floppy disk button to save it on your PC so you can read the eBook offline.
The 7-chapter ‘Web Designer’s Success Guide’ is described as a definitive reference guide when starting your own freelance Web design business, providing the reader with step-by-step instructions to transition from an employed web designer into a self-employed one. The book guides you in pricing and marketing your services as an added or sole income while enabling you to manage several design projects professionally.
The airgid site contains a snapshot of three positive professional reviews about the book and brings you to the Café Press where you can purchase the paperback version if you prefer printed books. There’s also a news item you can click to bring you to the web-centric FITC site which sponsors and endorses the eBook.
Click on the link below to view or download this free ebook:-
Web Designers Success Guide: How To Profit From Freelance Web Design
Eloquent JavaScript: A Modern Introduction to Programming
by eloquentjavascript.net
The site is a cover portal to the eBook ‘Eloquent JavaScript: A Modern Introduction to Programming’ by Marjin Haverbeke, a basic reference guide to web programming with emphasis on the JavaScript programming language. The eBook has 15 chapters, a couple of appendices, and an index page.
It is currently available at Amazon for $18.23 but it can be accessed through this site free in open license form. The eBook comes in three digital versions – as interactive HTML which opens the eBook right in your browser, a one-page non-interactive HMTL which also opens in your browser and which you can save with your browser’s save file facility, and as Zipped HTML which prompts you for a direct download of its 1.5 Mb interactive HTML file.
The eBook has 14 chapters, a couple of appendices, errata, examples and an index page. The download Zipped HTML version has a few more files than what you have on the online version, such as an errata page and several example pages. Each chapter is confined to a page, making scrolling down to finish reading the chapter necessary. Navigation between chapters is easy since each page comes with the ‘next’ and ‘previous chapter’ text buttons as well as getting to the table of contents page.
Click on the link below to view or download this free ebook:-
Eloquent JavaScript: A Modern Introduction to Programming
Practicing Ruby
by blog.rubybestpractices.com
The 8-chapter eBook ‘Rube Best Practices’ by blogger and web guru Gregory Brown is a compilation of his blog articles from January to March 2010. The compilation is generally about the best web development practices that the author has gathered in talking with several web page developers using the Ruby programming language. In addition to the 7 chapters taken from his blog installment releases during the 3-month period, the eBook in its entirety includes the final chapter ‘skillful Project Maintenance’, along with three appendixes: ‘Writing Backwards Compatible Code’, ‘Leveraging Ruby’s Standard Library’, and ‘Ruby Worst Practices’.
You won’t see a download button on the site. You have to read the text and when you come across the hyperlinked phrase ‘grab the whole thing’ the PDF file gets downloaded to your browser’s Acrobat Reader where you can click its disk icon button to save it to your PC. The site also has links that let you revisit the original blogs that posted the chapters in installments. Each of blogs provides a good summary introduction to each of the first 7 chapters. The 8th chapter and appendices are exclusive to the download version. The entire book is available over the O’reilly and Amazon sites and its free digital version is available under the Creative Commons license.
Click on the link below to view or download this free ebook:-
Practicing Ruby
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