An Opportunity Apart

A Book Apart publishes short books on single topics for working web designers/developers. The short length of these books lends themselves to clear, detailed examinations of single topics that are of importance to people who work on the web.

The first issue – HTML5 for Web Designers by Jeremy Keith – was a fantastically written, incredibly informative, and beautifully designed book; which I devoured in approximately 2.5-3 hours immediately after receiving it. I can’t speak highly enough of this book, even as a non-professional web “designer”.

The next issue will be CSS3 for Web Designers by Dan Cederholm, which also promises to be a great read. This is set to be followed by The Elements of Content Strategy by Erin Kissane, and Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte.

While these books sound fantastic, and I will clearly purchase each and every issue, given the focus on web professionals, I think this series has exposed a gap in the market. Whether this gap represents a missed opportunity for the team behind A Book Apart, or such a small niche to be of little to no consquence I honestly don’t know.

The gap that I refer to is the beginner/less than knowledgable web designer/developer market.

Web design is often bemoaned as a crowded field where anybody with a computer, a little knowledge of HTML and a copy of Photoshop can call themselves a web designer. There certainly are a large number of people out there who fit that bill exactly, and they certainly do refelect poorly on the profession.

However, there are also a number of people out there who, like myself, don’t want to be lumped in with the hacks, and want to learn how to do things properly before they even begin to consider calling themselves designers or developers. For myself, I feel that my HTML skills are about 99% as good as anyone else’s, while my CSS skills are about 70-75% of the way to where I want them to be1.

So, what this exposes is an opportunity for a similar series of books – short, clear, detailed, and written by experts – to help people with little to no knowledge in certain areas. I have actually got a list of books in my mind that I would love to see written, most of which are introductions to scripting langauges:

  1. Introduction to PHP
  2. Advanced CSS Principles2
  3. Introduction to JavaScript
  4. Introduction to Ruby on Rails
  5. Introduction to MySQL
  6. Color Theory
  7. Introduction to Typography

I’ve got more, but they tend to get more specific after that. As you can see, a lot of them are quite basic to people who have professional experience, but these topics can seem quite intimidating to those who don’t have someone to show us the basics.

If I thought I was the right man for the job, I would definitely take up the challenge and try to find the right people to write these books, and create my own version of A Book Apart. Unfortunately, I know that I’m not the right person, and that’s why I’m putting this idea out there. Hopefully, someone will stumble across this and run with my idea.

Footnotes

  1. There is really only a few things I don’t quite get just yet — positioning being one of them. ↩
  2. Subtitled: The box model, positioning, and putting the cascade in Cascading Style Sheets. ↩