Wow! eBook – Blog

Book Description

This thorough, self-paced guide to Adobe Creative Suite 4 is ideal for users who want to learn the key features of Adobe’s stellar collection of professional design tools. Readers are first given a brief program overview of the Design Suite that highlights common features and includes a section on cross-media workflows. Then readers will get up to speed with each software application using step-by-step, project-based lessons, with the lessons in each chapter building upon the reader’s growing knowledge of the programs. Projects include designing a logo and creating basic assets, creating a brochure, prototyping a basic Website, creating interactive Flash and PDF documents, communicating through mobile devices, and submitting work for collaborative reviews. Review questions at the end of each chapter wrap up each lesson to help reinforce the skills learned in each chapter.

About the Author
The Adobe Creative Team of designers, writers, and editors has extensive, real-world knowledge of and expertise in using Adobe products. They work closely with the Adobe product development teams and Adobe’s Instructional Communications team to come up with creative, challenging, and visually appealing projects to help both new and experienced users get upto speed quickly on Adobe software products. Download Now »

Book Description

Get ready to experience an eye-opening expos on CSS as you know it today. You’ll discover a fresh approach to coding Cascading Style Sheets, making old hacks and workarounds a distant memory.

In this book, you’ll learn how to start taking full advantage of Internet Explorer 8 using the very latest CSS techniques — whilst still catering for those nasty old browsers. You’ll unearth what’s put the final nail in the HTML table-based layout coffin, and gain an understanding from two experts why CSS has a very bright future.

Some of the valuable insights in this book include:

• how you can take full advantage of IE8
• how to take CSS tables to the limit and beyond
• letting you say goodbye to old hacks and workarounds FOREVER!
• help you rediscover what you first loved about CSS
• ensure make the most of what CSS has to offer
• understand the road ahead for CSS

CSS was conceived in an age when web site design was simple; its creators never anticipated the level of intricacy required in the designs that it would be asked to deliver today. Clever designers figured out ways to make CSS do what they needed, but using techniques so convoluted that it became unpredictable and difficult to master. CSS just became too hard … Download Now »

Book Description

“If you are a young designer entering or contemplating entering the UX field this is a canonical book. If you are an organization that really needs to start grokking UX this book is also for you. “  — Chris Bernard, User Experience Evangelist, Microsoft

User experience design is the discipline of creating a useful and usable Web site or application—one that’s easily navigated and meets the needs of both the site owner and its users. But there’s a lot more to successful UX design than knowing the latest Web technologies or design trends: It takes diplomacy, project management skills, and business savvy. That’s where this book comes in. Authors Russ Unger and Carolyn Chandler show you how to integrate UX principles into your project from start to finish.

• Understand the various roles in UX design, identify stakeholders, and enlist their support
• Obtain consensus from your team on project objectives
• Define the scope of your project and avoid mission creep
• Conduct user research and document your findings
• Understand and communicate user behavior with personas
• Design and prototype your application or site
• Make your product findable with search engine optimization
• Plan for development, product rollout, and ongoing quality assurance Download Now »

Book Description

Create your own professional-quality templates with this fast, friendly guide

• Create Joomla! 1.5 Templates for your sites
• Debug, validate, and package your templates
• Tips for tweaking existing templates with Flash, extensions and JavaScript libraries

In Detail Using Joomla! Templates with HTML and CSS allows you to give a unique look and feel to your site, present a “fresh face” to your pre-existing content, ensure that your site design is consistent with your brand, and build a site layout that suits your unique needs. A quality web site is easily within your grasp using these cutting-edge templates. However, even experienced web developers need help to take their designs and turn them into flexible and easily maintainable Joomla! 1.5 templates.

The release of Joomla! 1.5 meant a radically enhanced template system that is very different from that of Joomla! 1.0. Joomla! 1.5 comes complete with the ability to create template overrides and customize “module chrome”. The Joomla! development team has also revamped the template process by introducing clean, understandable jdoc tags in place of the PHP function-based Mambo-derived markup that Joomla! 1.0 templates used. This book focuses squarely on the new enhancements to the Joomla! 1.5 templating process and walks web designers through the process of turning a working XHTML and CSS “mockup” into a fully functional Joomla! 1.5 template. Download Now »

Book Description

You have probably heard a lot about Design Patterns—a technique that helps you design rock-solid solutions to practical problems that programmers everywhere encounter in their day-to-day work. Even though there has been a lot of buzz, however, no-one has yet come up with a comprehensive resource on design patterns for PHP developers—until today.

Author Jason E. Sweat’s book php|architect’s Guide to PHP Design Patterns is the first, comprehensive guide to design patterns designed specifically for the PHP developer. This book includes coverage of 16 design patterns with a specific eye to their applications in PHP when building complex web applications, both in PHP 4 and PHP 5 (where appropriate, sample code for both versions of the language is provided). With a thorough, test-driven approach, this book represents the definitive guide to design patterns for the PHP developer.

As you can expect from a php|architect book, this Guide is very focused on its topic, with none of the fluff that accompanies the large, expensive titles you sometimes find at the bookstore. Naturally, this doesn’t come at the expense of depth of coverage or clarity: the book contains tens of scripts that give you a practical overview of every topic covered, from top to bottom.

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