Required & Recommended Texts

HTML & CSS Books | Javascript, JQuery Books | Drupal Books/Videos

 

Many of these books are also available locally at Village Books - visit their site or call ahead to check availability or to ask them to order it for you. Barnes & Noble also has a great selection of technical books. And of course Amazon has good prices if you're willing to have your books shipped - you can use the links below to order from Amazon.

First Term (Basic HTML and CSS)

HTML, XHTML, and CSS by Rob Huddleston, published by Visual Blueprint, is the only required text we'll be using for class this year. Homework assignments will come from this book so it's important to have it. (Now available on Kindle! see bottom of page)

Other books you may find of interest for first term include:

• Build Your Own Web Site the Right Way Using HTML & CSS is a good approach with an emphasis on free tools. If you are interested in a PDF (downloadable) version you can go to the book website.
• Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML is a right-brain approach to coding HTML and CSS. If you want a second book with a very different approach, this might be useful for you. It's more of a dip-into book and has lots of little exercises and examples.
• The two pocket references (CSS and HTML &XHTML) from O'Reilly are useful (and small) to carry around, but you can also get the information on-line (for free).

 

       

 

For second and third terms there are no required texts. All the information you need is available on-line. However students always want to know my favorites - so these are some of my favorites on the the topics we'll be discussing.

Second Term

• The O'Reilly Javascript Pocket Reference is useful for quickly looking stuff up - especially for helping you to understand code you've "borrowed" from someone else.
• The Zen of CSS Design and Stylin' with CSS and two of many wonderful advanced CSS books. I recommend you sit down at a good bookstore and pick one you like!
• jQuery Cookbook is my favorite jQuery book - really worth working through the projects.
• jQuery in Action is another good introductory text to using the jQuery library that we'll be exploring.

 

       

 

Third Term (Drupal Content Management System)

These are listed left to right in order of advanced-ness (is that a word?).

• The Building Powerful and Robust Websites and Using Drupal are good introductory texts that require no back-end coding.
• Front-End Drupal is a more advanced look and everything that goes into look-and-feel in a Drupal site (and is also available for Kindle).
• Pro Drupal Development is an advanced book for those that want to dig into Module and Theme development.
• Lots of books at Packt Publishing and Lullabot.com Store

 

     

E-books Etc

I find I'm reading more and more books either on my computer or on my Kindle (see left). More and more technical books can be bought directly for the Kindle, but lots of others are available in PDF form. Sitepoint, mentioned above, makes all their books available in PDF, as does Packt Publishing.

Technical books on Kindle

Let me know if you find out about more - they're always being added!

Our required Text: HTML, XHTML, and CSS: Your Visual Blueprint

Front End Drupal (see above)

Pro-Drupal Development (see above)

Lots of other CSS and HTML books!