Books from which I learnt the most

As a self-teaching person I use books as the main source of valid information, more than Internet because you can validate the author, his work and acknowledgment.

When I started learning CSS the book that helped me the most was Simon Collison’s Beginning CSS Web Development: From Novice to Professional.

This wonderful book covers form the very basic styling concepts to advanced techniques. It has core concepts about images on the web, usability and HTML best practices.

It was like the bible to me and I recommend it to everyone learning CSS because it leaves you a very strong base, which you can expand reading the next book.


CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions
is a book of Andy Budd. It is in its second edition, I don’t really know if something is different in this version, I’ve read the first one.

This book starts with a brief notion of CSS basics, just an introduction, then it goes further and explore some really interesting techniques and advanced concepts in the CSS styles development.

I wish I had read it right after “Begining CSS development”, it would have saved me a lot of headaches.

DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model.

After working some months with pure CSS I discovered the need of some client-side programming to make the site more catchy.

There’s where DOM scripting can teach the core concepts of the DOM and show some interesting examples.

Don't Make Me Think

When talking about Usability, this book is a must.

Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug.

This is a pretty simple reading book, but it contains most things you should know if you work in the web development field. It has practical examples of dos and don’ts and an introduction to usability testing.

It’s a short book but it worths every single page.

Well that was my short list of interesting books about web-development. I’d be very happy to hear yours!

Thanks for reading.

PabloBenitez.com

Some days ago the new design of  Centerax’s blog was released. I was in charge of applying some styles to it, but keeping it as minimalistic as I could. Taking advantage of the already reviewed typekit, I used a nice font as the main design feature.

PabloBenitez.com

The result was pretty nice, althoug it still needs some styling adjustments.

Thanks Centerax for trusting me for this project.

Giving Typekit a try

Some days ago I read the great Simon Collison talking about Typekit, I had never heard about it so I decided to make some research.

Typekit is a service that solves most major font problems on web design. As you may know when designing a site you find yourself  limited to use only web safe fonts to make sure most users will see your design properly. The problem with it is that the list reduces to less than 10 fonts.

To fix that, web developers incurred in text-replacement methods that take your dynamic text and return some kind of image or flash output with the fancy font you chose.

And even better, on CSS 3 we have the marvelous @font-face property that allow us to use a specific font we upload to the server calling it directly form the CSS file, and works on most decent browsers.

All that sounds great for us but not for typeface designers because you can download the font directly from the server of the site is using it.

So here’s where typekit has all the solutions, they are associated with a buch of type designers that allow you to use their fonts on your projects. And even better you can use them from your stylesheet and they will look great on most browsers, yeah, including that one.

Of course all this work isn’t free, but you can make use of a trial account to test those functionalities, and even the bundle account isn’t expensive at all.

It is very simple to use, you have a control panel to define the selectors you want to apply the font as a default or they give you the font-stack to add to your stylesheet.

The only thing you have to do is to add two lines of javascript they provide you to include the typekit call and you’re done!

I strongly recommend giving this service a try and avoiding any licencing problems. They have a lot of fonts to fit your design perfectly.

Well that’s my experience using typekit using a trial account.

Thanks for reading!

RPG Uruguay site

Last October RPG Uruguay site was launched.

I worked with the great designer Ana Laura Suescun to make this site. It is a simple, clean site. I used hand-coded HTML/CSS and a little bit of javascript for the menu animation.

It was really nice working on this site because I learned about this therapeutic procedure focused on posture reeducation.

Welcome to Ziongem.com!

Hello! This the new ziongem.com, a blog to share my works, thoughts and worth-to-share information.

I am using Wordpress as the blog engine and the theme Smooth by My tapestry.

I know I should have done a theme myself but you know how is this field, you put your site at the end of the work line.  As said in Spanish “en casa de hererro cuchillo de palo”.

So I will try to keep this site more updated now, and share some interesting links I find on the web.

Thanks a lot for reading!