Shopping at Chapters

Today, I decided to go shopping for a book or two. I dropped Bonnie at work and then headed for the nearest Chapters. It was fun to walk on St-catherines St. on a Saturday night. I hadn’t done that for a long time. Anyways, I first browsed the magazine section for a good issue of Computer Arts but wasn’t impressed with their August issue and So I switched to the Web Design book section. I saw a couple of the books I keep reading about around the web like: Eric Meyers on CSS, The Zen of CSS Design by Dave Shea and Molly E. Holzschlag, and Bulletproof Web Design by Dan Cederholm. Ironically, I didn’t really like what I saw on those books, well I did but I have a limited budget, and decided against. So I moved on to the programming section. Again. Not good enough.

I finally ended up in the Design section and I decided to get Kimberley Elam’s book on the Geometry of Design. Only then did I decide to also get Jeffrey Zeldman’s book Designing with web standards. So here I am now. Two new books and a whole lot to learn.

I’ve only started to read the book by Kimberley Elam and it is really good. I mean, I’m almost done already and I’ve owned it for only two hours. The topic is really interesting, touching how mathematics can be applied to beautiful design or, in fact, how mathematics potentially explain why we prefer some designs to others. It’s a real eye-opener and I suggest it to anybody who would like to read a little on this subject. Great buy!

As for the book by Zeldman, it is basically a bible in terms of how to respect web standards when developping on the web and a little introduction to the main topics surrounding the web development of today. I haven’t really started to read this one, but the couple lines I’ve read here and there were really promising. I will let you know officially what I thought when I am done. For now, I have some reading to do.