HTML |
| HTML, XHTML & CSS This easy to understand and follow HTML guide by Elizabeth Castro is a great place to start when you're looking for assistance. Beginners and beyond will find solid assistance in this well-designed manual. Examples are given and clearly documented. 
| | Learn HTML 4 (In a Weekend) Well, I don't know about the weekend claim but it is a good book. Unlike many HTML books it's not just a reference manual but actually teaches. ____________________ _________________ |
Flash |
| Flash for Dummies Even if your not a fan of the Dummies books this volume does have good material for Flash beginners. Design tutorials allow the user to get started. However, it does not cover Actionscript to a degree that's allows the reader to write code. | | Flash Professional Not a beginners book but full of good tips and Flash examples as well as a CD with usable examples. |
Graphics |
| Learning Macromedia Fireworks 8
As Fireworks is my hands down favorite graphics tool I had to include this excellent book. Good examples and good tutorials.
| | Adobe Photoshop CS2 Classroom in a Book Photoshop can be daunting for new users. Its features are so numerous and the use of them so flexible that help is certainly needed. |
Writing Essentials |
| Little, Brown Essential Handbook Desiging a web site requires writing. Good writing skills are essential. I've been using this excellent book for many years for all my writing related work. There isn't much you can't find in this great resource.
| | Concise Oxford English Dictionary The Big one is 20 volumes and contains over half a million words but chances are you won't be getting that one. Short of subscribing to the online version buying this one will be an invaluable life-long resource. |
Design |
| The Elements of Graphic Design Good graphic design takes some degree of knowledge. How many web sites have you seen that just don't look right? Stop and read this book and then go back and add graphics that make people return again and again. |
| Icons of Design The 20th Century This is not a tutorial book. It's a book about designs and designers who changed the 20th Century. Inspiration abounds. |
Idea Sources |
| A Whack on the Side of the Head
I bought this book many years ago and have gone back to it over and over. It's a simple little book about finding ways to look at things in new ways and find sources of creativity within you. It’s fun and very inspiring.
| | The World's Greatest Ideas Let's see, how many copies of this book have I purchased and given away? Hmm, I've lost count. If you buy no other book on this page get this one. If this doesn't help you with new ideas you may want to give up. What a great book!
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Be Inspired |
| Leonardo da Vinci Paintings, Sketches and Drawings It's BIG! it Weighs a LOT! It COSTS a LOT and it's worth it. See da Vinci images like you've never seen them. This popular master of all things deserves a book as big and as all encompassing as this one. From Amazon- Lying open, this unutterably wonderful book is almost the size of the Mona Lisa and about as hefty as a slab of The Last Supper's monastery wall. All 34 paintings are here (including what we know of the lost ones), many with huge and immensely illuminating details, plus 663 drawings. _____________________________ | | Beautiful Evidence "Science and art," according to Tufte, "have in common intense seeing, the wide-eyed observing that generates empirical information." This book is about how that seeing turns into showing. Tufte, professor emeritus at Yale University and author of three previous widely praised books on visual evidence, displays outstanding examples of the genre. One of the most arresting is Galileo's series of hand-drawn images of sunspots. A colleague of Galileo, the author tells us, said that the astronomer's drawings "delight both by the wonder of the spectacle and the accuracy of expression." That, Tufte says, is beautiful evidence. - Editors of Scientific American |