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Resources - Book Bytes |
| by Stephen M.H. Braitman - NBMA Director of Communications Book Bytes announces new publications of interest to our members and community in multimedia, technology, business, and culture. First appearance of each Book Bytes column is in the NBMA email events newsletter. To subscribe, send a blank email message to: nbmaevents-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. If you have a recommendation for review — and, especially, if you have published a book — send the information to . |
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November 2002 Submit Now: Designing Persuasive Web Sites Andrew Clark 342 pages, $35.00 New Riders www.newriders.com I don't believe the word "stickiness" is used once in Andrew Clark's new book, but SUBMIT NOW is the latest permutation on the theme of how to get people involved with your Web site and stick, I mean, stay with it until they're hooked. Either by buying or joining or using your Web site. Enhaced with a series of clever intersections between successful Web examples, psychology, and marketing, Clark concisely looks at all the elements that touch a user's experience and makes fresh-sounding assessments on how they can be made more effective. One chapter he devotes to "transactors," those people who are ready to buy something at your site. With graphic shorthand, he outlines their motivations and what should be your response: Make your transactions quick. Don't make users register or create an account just to make a purchase. Let customers choose whatever method they want to do business with you. Clark makes it easy to get the big picture and then delves into details of payment options, email transmittal, contracts, even in-store pickup and phone ordering. Other chapters include a deeper look at customers and their myriad personalities and problems, and the architecture of moving through a site to get to what a customer needs. This is a breezy, yet handy book with a great many good ideas. Creating Applications With Mozilla David Boswell and others 456 pages, $39.95 www.oreilly.com www.oreilly.com One of the more exciting development platforms is the Mozilla browser. Yes, I had to read this new book's introduction to find out exactly what that meant, and the book readily admits using a browser for more than surfing the Web may seem a novelty to some. But the history of Mozilla starts as the code name for the development platform used to create the Netscape 5.0 browser suite. When Netscape released the Communicator code to the open source community, it created a revolution in decentralized development of Web applications. The cross-platform capabilities of what became an independent browser as well as a working environment with the introduction of Mozilla 1.0 seem nearly limitless. It has spurred several streams of development to improve not only the kinds of applications that can be created but the tools of creation themselves. CREATING APPLICATIONS WITH MOZILLA begins at the beginning and takes anyone remotely familiar with JavaScript, CCS, HTML, and other basic Web-based tools and carefully, methodically turns the reader into someone who can build dynamic applications with multiple functionalities in cross-platform environments. In the open source spirit, the book is also available at http://books.mozdev.org/. The Fast Track To Profit: An Insider's Guide To Exploiting The World's Best Internet Technologies Lee G. Caldwell 207 pages, $29.99 Prentice Hall www.phptr.com This is one of those attention-grabbing books that shout seemingly bold, urgent messages about how to save businesses from falling into the trap of overly expensive, under-performing technology. It speaks to the busy Chairman of the Board or CEO who needs to know that centralized online data sheets and specifications can be a valuable asset to the enterprise when it needs to move quickly to meet changing demand or competitive pressures. It reveals that Internet technologies "can add to your underlying customer-value propositions in a million different ways," including bringing "products to market faster" and reducing "cycle times," etc., etc., etc. Lee Caldwell is a VP and CTO at Hewlett-Packard and he has the quick ease of someone who's been involved for a long time with consortiums and partnerships designed to integrate systems and speed up development processes. FAST TRACK TO PROFIT is comprised of high-level strategic talk with some historical perspectives and anecdotal information. Information Architecture: Blueprints For The Web Christina Wodtke 348 pages, $29.99 New Riders www.newriders.com Book Website www.blueprintsfortheweb.com Christina Wodtke's witty and charming introduction to Web information architecture graciously acknowledges more comprehensive books on the subject (including O'Reilly's INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE FOR THE WORLD WIDE WEB reviewed here recently). But her approach is so personable that this may be the best place to begin. Illustrated with cartoons, screen shots, photographs, and diagrams, her INFORMATION ARCHICTECTURE takes the approach that designing information is designing for people. She talks a lot about setting up the goals of designing an architecture by keeping users in mind in everything from locating access to main pages to telling "stories" about how things will happen or what a user can do on a Web site. She uses philosophical writer Joseph Campbell as a touchstone in suggesting that the personas we create through a Web site essentially travel through scenarios of design, evaluation, and communication. "Creating scenarios is a way for us to take the pleasure and usefulness of storytelling and apply it to the act of designing interactive systems." Couple an almost spiritual approach with healthy doses of humor and you've got a book that you can easily read and live with as you grow in expertise. Retooling: A Historian Confronts Technological Change Rosalind Williams 252 pages, $27.95 MIT Press mitpress.mit.edu Rosalind Williams is a cultural historian who has concentrated on the impact of technology on society. From 1995 through 2000, she was the dean of students and undergraduate education at MIT. That vantage point has given her a unique perspective on the wax and wane of technology as a social force. This sensitively written, thoughtful meditation and resulting analysis takes place in the past, the present, and the future. She opens the book with a personal family history, writing how her grandfather moved from a farmer's life to that of an academic in the leading technological institution of the country and how it changed that life and the lives of those around him. From there she moves on to her experiences with students and other academics at MIT, which represents to her an emblematic profile of the many confrontations that occur during periods of rapid change. There is philosophy here amongst the social analysis, and a subtle reach for changing our consciousness about whether technology is an external force subverting humanity or simply an external manifestation of our innate natural tendencies. HTML For The World Wide Web, 5th Edition Elizabeth Castro 480 pages, $21.99 Peachpit Press www.peachpit.com Another new HTML book keeps pace with the latest versions of HTML, XHTML and CSS. The usual splendid Peachpit style presents a visually clear management of the training process from beginner level to expert. Each double-page spread uses the two middle columns for illustrations and examples; the outer two columns are by-number explanations and extra tips and suggestions. Castro is smart to combine teaching HTML and XHTML right at the start so that one doesn't get the feeling that after they learn the ancestral HTML they have to learn a whole new thing when they get to XHTML. The similarities are taught as one; the differences are sharply etched; taken as a whole, you're just learning two different aspects of one thing, Web page creation. There's a very nice fold-out Color Table attached to the back of the book. The PERL CD Bookshelf 4,100 page, $119.95 O'Reilly www.oreilly.com This lofty package compiles seven books covering all aspects of PERL programming on a CD-ROM, and includes the 2nd edition of the (real) book, "Perl In A Nutshell." It's massive, perhaps daunting combination that may make a dedicated programmer dream in smiles. Besides "Nutshell," you get "Programming Perl," "Perl & XML," "Mastering Perl/Tk," "Learning Perl," the "Perl Cookbook," and "Perl & LWP." All are the latest versions, and the Web connection allows updating when necessary. It may be an investment, but separately these books would cost a lot more, and you wouldn't get the advantage of sleek searchability through all texts at once. If you do, or want to do, Perl, you'll never need anything else. Final Cut Pro For AVID Editors: A Guide For Editors Making The Switch Diana Weynand 271 pages, $34.99 Peachpit Press www.peachpit.com A no-nonsense cut-to-the-chase guide to folks who work with video and film, Web or otherwise, who have decided for career survival that they must learn Apple's Final Cut Pro. Usually that means migrating from Avid Media Composer, but this is the book to smooth the transition from whatever non-linear digital video editing system you've used previous to what is quickly becoming the industry standard. Diana Weynand is a genial host for the process of learning the necessary new techniques and tricks. Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy Ann Rockley with Pamela Kostur and Steve Manning 565 pages, $39.99 New Riders www.newriders.com This is a strong contender for becoming the standard textbook on managing content for the enterprise. Not only does Rockley and her team present the usual topical categories that need to be covered - doing a content audit, information modeling, dynamic content delivery, workflow design, management systems - they also present schemas for measuring the bottom line potential for content management implementation. Return-on-investment and reuse scenarios are key to a strategic content plan that makes sense at the executive level. Why spend the dollars if the system is going to cost too much, take too much time, be too difficult to use, and can't streamline the creation and use of intellectual property? MANAGING ENTERPRISE CONTENT offers solid tools to answer those high-level questions, and helps stakeholders grab the initiative on designing the most effective content management solution for their company. MAC OS X 10.2 Visual Quickstart Guide Maria Langer 354 pages, $21.99 Peachpit Press www.peachpit.com I think that "Maria Langer" is not a real person. I believe she's a corporate character, like Aunt Jemima and Mr. Clean, who is used to identify certain reliable, regularly updated technology books that just keep coming and coming. It's a brand name that denotes quality, ease-of-understanding, and quick learning. How else would "Maria Langer" produce at least 56 (according to Amazon) books in just a few years? She's probably a team of sweating slaves chained to their desktops in the dank, dark basement of Peachpit Press. The new guide to Mac OS X 10.2 is just as good as the 10.1 edition was, and can keep any professional using the system at the top of their game. Constructing Accessible Web Sites Jim Thatcher, Cynthia Waddell, Shawn Henry, Sarah Swierenga, Mark Urban, Michael Burks, Bob Regan, Paul Bohman 400 pages, $49.99 glasshaus /www.glasshaus.com/ Building Accessible Websites Joe Clark 415 pages, $39.99 New Riders www.newriders.com Whoa, I'm not going to get into this battle. There are several good books out there about ADA compliance and building Web sites and services that either accommodate people with disabilities or supplement their offline activities. These two are both reasonable publications devoted to getting your Web site into compliance, or at least serving as wide an audience as possible. The glasshaus compendium massively deals with all the technical and construction aspects of disability-sensitive Web development. Joe Clark takes a more personal approach, with an often philosophical component added in. Both books will give you ideas about different approaches to style sheets and multimedia, to name just two, but their different approaches to the subject have generated fierce loyalties. Call me a coward, but I'm going to remain totally agnostic on this matter. Leonardo's Laptop: Human Needs And The New Computing Technologies Ben Shneiderman 283 pages, $24.95 MIT Press mitpress.mit.edu Ben Shneiderman is a dreamer in academic's clothing. He's been inspired by the renaissance activities of Leonardo da Vinci to ruminate at length on the subject of technology and human interaction. LEONARDO'S LAPTOP is practical philosophy and operating manual for transforming the development process of computers and software from technology centric to user centric. Just like e-commerce is gradually being subsumed into one idea, an old one, commerce, so will computer technology be made invisible as it merely functions as a wholly integrated component of what humans do. Shneiderman dreams of UI designed for universal access, and complete international interactivity. His book looks in detail at such components of the new paradigm as delivery of medical services, education options, the political impact, and the home environment. Some of his ideas are still sci-fi, but his is a dramatic and needed call for everyone from Web designers and developers to IT managers and executives. "I want user interface designers to think more grandly about human needs and become the bright shining source of innovation. Interface designers should be proposing new classes of products, not just evaluating and refining someone else's technology." How To Use Windows XP, Bestseller Edition Walter Glenn 293 pages, $29.99 Que www.quepublishing.com This is a superbly designed user manual for the latest Windows generation, with easy to understand beginner-level descriptions of basic operations like connecting a printer, saving files, and organizing the desktop. But it also gives enough clarity to arcana like disk defragment, system sounds and alerts, networking, and compressing files, that general users will find it handy to keep at their desk for reference. The colorful and accurately illustrated steps defined for solving or dealing with each issue make it a pleasure, rather than an intimidation, to actually gain mastery over the software. The Knowledgement Management Tookit, Second Edition Amrit Tiwana 383 pages, $44.99 Prentice Hall www.phptr.com Simply stated, "KM enables the creation, distribution, and exploitation of knowledge to create and retain greater value from core business competencies . . . The primary goal of KM in a business context is to facilitate opportunistic application of fragmented knowledge through integration." And from this start, Amrit Tiwana begins his textbook survey of the practical implementation of business and technology systems to manage the often hidden or decentralized information within a company that emerges critical to its success (or failure). Although knowledge management remains obscure to many, the goal here is to specify the kinds of information / knowledge that needs to be captured and managed properly. Tiwana's contention is that knowledge retains more long-term ROI potential than any other component of a business. Essentially, it's a people tool, a formalized process for dealing with what's been collected in people's brains that is of substantive value to the company. To that end, it touches upon all functions from networking to workflow to executive strategy to customer relations and beyond. Daunting it may be, but THE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMET TOOLKIT makes the best attempt at bringing coherence to the subject. Accompanying it is a valuable CD-ROM with a 10-step roadmap to KM, as well as a whole slew of software tools. HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide, 5th edition Chuck Musciano and Bill Kennedy 645 pages, $39.95 O'Reilly www.oreilly.com As expected, the new edition of O'Reilly's HTML & XHTML Guide is lean in the good way of teaching clearly, patiently, accurately. And it's rich in the exponential growth it affords the subject from beginner status to expert. With so many basic primers on the essential Web language out there, choosing one to learn with is more a matter of personal style than any qualitative difference. If you like to read lots of discrete little sections on every important item, Musciano and Kennedy map out the way to mastery very well. It's not a flashy, colorful journey, but then the quality of writing holds its own very well in sustaining interest and intelligibility. The Elements Of User Experience: User-Centered Design For The Web Jesse James Garrett 189 pages, $29.99 New Riders www.newriders.com Along with Ben Shneiderman (above) and others, Jesse James Garrett is part of the new designer breed calling for a transformation of the user experience of technology. Garrett focuses on the Web, with a conceptual "big picture" that takes in what he calls the "five planes" or elements of user experience - surface, skeleton, structure, scope, and strategy. Essentially, these break down on the design level to all those qualities of the Web experience that relate function to use. Garrett has a graduated project management method for gaining the transformation of UI that starts with "a clearly articulated strategy" and then proceeds to defining out the scale of the project, and so on. There's a large amount of conceptualism and philosophy, but the practical, tactical details don't elude him either. Media And Sovereignty: The Global Information Revolution And Its Challenge To State Power Monroe E. Price 327 pages, $29.95 MIT Press mitpress.mit.edu In the midst of a global media revolution, Monroe Price steps in with an academic review of the situation. How governments control their people through the media has long been subject to discussion. But how governments use media to control policy in the international arena is less visible, less understood. Through the Web, television, and radio, state governments are becoming increasingly bold in turning the popular technologies to opportunistic and propagandistic purposes. This is a dense read, but MEDIA AND SOVEREIGNTY is an important cautionary tale for anyone whose professional life touches any form of media, or who considers themselves "media savvy." Chances are you'll lose whatever innocence you didn't even know you still had. |
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