Learning Web Design, 5th Edition
Annotations
Learning Web Design has been the standard textbook for learning HTML, CSS, and web images for over 20 years. It has been kept up to date remarkably well but does suffer a bit from age. For example, there is no mention of modern web publishing methods such as static site generators, JAMStack, lambdas, nor serverless deployments through services like Netlify and GitLab. The book is heavy on CSS coverage and extremely light on JavaScript (recommending instead to read the O’Reilly Learning JavaScript book instead). But, the book’s coverage of web images is not to be ignored from a security perspective as well as design.
Before You Begin
You should create a Git repo directory to contain your notes and work. You can combine your Markdown notes with subdirectories containing the different projects from the book as you work through them.
The book is divided into five parts:
| Part | Title | Importance | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| I | Getting Started | Meh | These do give a good overview of how the web works, but we cover that also during the Networking and the Internet week. You might also find that these annotations are more useful in preparing to do the code in the book since they better match your Linux-specific preparations from ealier weeks. |
| II | HTML for Structure | Essential | Core covererage of HTML. |
| III | CSS for Presentation | Essential | Jennifer’s core expertise is clearly the field of web design with CSS and it really shows in this largest of the sections. Even though you don’t need to memorize every detail it contains it is definitely worth working through in its entirity — particularly the CSS FlexBox and Grid content. |
| IV | JavaScript for Behavior | Skip | Replace with Eloquent JavaScript which also covers HTTP. |
| V | Web Images | Essential | Understanding images is one of the most underappreciated areas of web development. Images give up your personal location and can be used for payloads not to mention how important understanding the decision to use vector v.s. raster images. |