It’s been three weeks now that I get to sleep at 3 o’clock in the morning. This has been my way of life since the start of the semester due to my class schedule that starts late in the afternoon. After going home from class at around nine in the evening, I eat what is supposed to be dinner and do other stuff. One of that stuff is reading the book entitled Designing with Web Standards (2nd Edition)

On the first week of class, I got to hang out in the library because we didn’t have a lot of things to do. As I am assigned to redesign the TomasinoWeb.org website, I took the initiative to look for web design books concentrating on CSS based layouts with clean and minimalist design. After a while, I found this book written by Jeffrey Zeldman that according to the “About the author” section was one of the first web designers. The style of writing was pretty much like the For Dummies series (which is one of my favorite book series with the promise of “Making Everything Easier”). It is comic but straight to the point. The book typography is serif but easy to read. Every chapter begins with colorful introductions (and I mean it literally). The illustrations and pictures vary widely from colored to sepia as some of them were dates back from black and white monitors of the early personal computing era (or at least when the internet was born). Occasionally, there is a bit of code which you can see clearly in a Typewriter-like font.

This book was published by New Riders in association with AIGA. I learned a lot of things in this book, some theoretical and others in the technical side of things. And one thing that I’m truly thankful of for this book is its explanation over ID and Class because that has been one of my problems with validating my XHTML 1.0 Transitional markup. But before I forget to bring it back to the library, I should prepare my pocket as it’s been three weeks since I borrowed this and there is some kind of rule in our library that everyday a book is in our possession, it costs us about five pesos.