From now to when you first learned how to build a website, the number of learning methods has changed dramatically. There are YouTube, digital books on mobile devices, blogs, and immersive online course platforms such as Treehouse and Udemy.
But we still believe that for those who are self-taught, one of the best ways to learn web design is to read books.
Suppose you have to restart the whole process of self-education on building a website but can understand what you know now. In that case, the following books will be the books you bought by yourself today.
We suggest you read these books according to your current level of web design.
Learning Web Design: A Beginner’s Guide
Regarding the comprehensiveness and technical proficiency of books, nothing is better than O’Reilly’s books.
“Learning Web Design” is a large book with more than 600 pages, but it is well written and will provide you with a solid foundation. It has many exercises, and we think it is best that yous practice them to get you into the habit of experimenting and testing with code.
This book is going to take you beyond CSS and HTML and get you dabbling in JavaScript and web graphics.
Although this book is designed for absolute beginners, like most other O’Reilly books, I don’t think it should be your first book on the subject, especially if you are not from a programming background. After you feel that you have a good grasp of the basics, it’s time to read a more technical and complete book to start to master these concepts.
Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
This book is old-8 years old, so in the context of evolving careers such as web design, it may have been written in the 14th century.
However, the concepts covered in this book are timeless. Although the book I mentioned earlier shows you how to build a website, this book will show you how to build a website for website users in the most effective way.
“Don’t Make Me Think” is a real breakthrough book, and I assure you that reading it will bring you a lot of “oh yeah” moments.
An updated version of this book is now available.
CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions
This book contains practical techniques to solve common web design problems you will encounter. To appreciate this book, please buy it after hours/days of debugging and rewriting the website’s HTML and CSS. This book will make you take a big step towards professional-level website design.
HTML and CSS: Design and Build Websites
Whenever you learn new knowledge, you want to see the results as soon as possible and do not want to be bothered by the subject’s technical problems.
When you are sure that the subject is something you want to master, you take the time to learn it from the inside out.
HTML and CSS: Designing and building websites allows you to start learning the basic concepts and creating websites’ basic techniques.
The presentation method of the theme is fascinating and has many visual effects. Writing is not scary, which is excellent so that you will not be discouraged to continue learning and complete the learning experience. That is why we recommend this book as your first web design book.
Designing with Web Standards
Now that you have mastered the HTML and CSS knowledge in the above books, it is time to learn professional-level technologies and concepts.
You will learn how and why to write standards-compliant HTML and CSS through the book “Design based on Web standards” and techniques for dealing with common Web design problems.
What makes me happy is that this book has been updated recently and with the participation of Ethan Marcotte, the guy who made responsive web design a term.
Why We Chose These Web Design Books
We selected these web design books based on the following aspects:
- Our interaction with readers who are interested in becoming website designers.
- When we trained other website designers and developers on site, we found that this is a useful website design teaching sequence
- Our experience as self-taught web designers/developers
We are not affiliated with any of the books we discussed above.
We try to choose web design books to read as your understanding and professional knowledge of web design improves.
There are many web design books on the website. It is recommended that you consider all options before deciding how to complete the task of self-education to become a professional web designer.
After that, you may want to explore other web design/web development areas, such as JavaScript, server-side scripting languages , and frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and PHP, relational databases such as MySQL, and developing solutions on top of content management systems such as WordPress and more. There are many options for going forward. There are many things that this industry can offer you.
Let your interests determine what you want to learn next. However, suppose you plan to become a professional web designer or web developer. In that case, we recommend building on a solid foundation composed of HTML, CSS, and web design best practices to truly learn from JavaScript and Java and other more complex Get the most benefit from things. PHP.
