I’ve bought a few JavaScript books in the distant past but I just couldn’t get my head around it so I consigned myself to either lifting it from a resource website or avoid the problem altogether.

This book however is another kettle of fish. I found the concept of the Document Object Model easy to understand — especially with strong Cascading Style Sheet experience behind me and Jeremy explains how to write JavaScript to manipulate the model in a very easy to understand way. All that’s left now is for me to recognise where I can responsibly apply this long sought after knowledge.

Buy it now safe in the knowledge that you are buying into best practice for an accessible and available Internet.

Buy now from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr or Amazon.co.jp

Yahoo! now offers several free interactive tools for publishers, bloggers, and podcasters — for anyone who creates content for the web. It’s a breeze to add simple action buttons to a web page to make it easy for users to share, save, or blog about your web site. See them in action on the full version of my posts here then check out the Guide to Yahoo! Social Media Tools.

Another fine book from Dan Cederholm. This time around he divvies a typical web page down to its components — text, navigation, boxes and rows and the layout itself and explains and demonstrates the most bulletproof way of implementing them in a standards-compliant way.

In each chapter he’ll pluck a real-world example to deconstruct, tell you why it’s not bulletproof and offer a rebuild in a very easy to follow manner using XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). He’ll then explain why his solution is bulletproof.

There’s something here for everyone, I consider myself pretty knowledgeable on the CSS front but I’ve said “Ohhhh, that’s neat” a few times already (I’m hopping around the book). Which is another point, it’s very accessible in that respect — no reading chapters 1 to 4 before tackling the issues presented in chapter 5 (hypothetical use of numbers).

Beginner or expert alike, I think you’ll like this book a lot.

Buy now from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr or Amazon.co.jp