So, for those who missed it, I attended @media this year. I really enjoyed the great speakers, learned some more things about design and usability and met quite a lot people for the first time. But what did I like the most? Here some things I actually learned and liked.

The first presentation was by Jeffrey Veen, about how to design with and organize data in a clear way. It is a bit impossible to reproduce the key things in one sentence. In my opinion it is a good thing to give the user a bit control of the way the data is resented. That could be done by a table with the data, and also displaying a graphic representation. (To make it accessible, you could use a table, and turn that with JavaScript and canvas into a graph. Something I discussed a bit with Robert Jan later.)

Another presentation I liked very much, was about Mental Models. Indi Young did a really great job giving us an introduction into that. Basically it is about asking people what they feel about something (a website, a hotel, anything), and the things they expect of it. By grouping all those things, and combining that with parts of the subject that support those feelings, you can quite easily see what kinds of things need to be changed to achieve a better experience for the clients or users. She has also written a book about it, and I put that one on my wishlist.

Andy Clark did a design presentation, wherein he explained in a very good way how he got inspiration from comic books for his designs. I think it was a good topic and it can be applied to other creative things, too. The essence is to understand really good what the original creator wanted you to feel or do. If you want to achieve the same with your website, it is a matter of applying the method used.

For me the presentation by Dan Rubin was very educative. As a developer, primarily, I don’t really have much experience in adding details to the designs I create. He pointed at a lot of things I really wouldn’t come with by myself.

Although I didn’t really learn much from the presentation Steve Faulkner gave on WAI-ARIA, it was good to be part of the audience. He introduced ARIA, the way to make applications accessible by applying some attributes to input elements. He clearly demonstrated what the benefits are, by using JAWS to demonstrate some simple applications that use ARIA. (A good point to start with ARIA, is the documentation at Mozilla.)

A great speaker was Richard Ishida, who demonstrated Unicode as a tool for creating an international website. He didn’t tell anything new to me, made very clear for everyone in the audience why and how to think good about i18n before you start to build the website. It was really a pity he couldn’t present a part of his presentation (not enough time).

So, that were the most interesting parts for me. I hope to attend @media next year again, I’d really love to see more presentations like these.

For my non-Dutch readers this post will not be very interesting. I’ll review the Dutch book Webdesign Rules!, written by Ruben Bos. This book helps people to find the good directions in the web development world.

The whole book is aimed to make clear for everyone who doesn’t make web sites, how a good web site works. Moreover, how to find a good company to build such a site. This also includes ways to check your current web site.

A good web site, according to the book, is a good combination of content, marketing, usability and technique. But how good is this book for people who make web sites? We know how to do that, or how to get to know how to do that, don’t we know?

I’d say yes. For me, nothing is really new in this book. But the best part of this book is to describe in a few words what a web site needs, to make the client happy. Everything is very clearly written, and the illustrations are sometimes exactly right. We, as developers, can better assist clients through the whole process.

There are no real downsides of this book. Maybe you could be disappointed about how fast you’ll have read it. But in my opinion that a very good point about his book.

The book can be ordered via the website, and I’ve heard also in book stores soon.

A while ago I bought the book DOM Scripting: Web Design with JavaScript and the Document Object Model by Jeremy Keith. The title says it quite well, this book is about using JavaScript and the DOM to extend the user experience of web sites.

The first chapter gives some background information about the history of JavaScript. Not as extensive as ppk on JavaScript, but good for beginners. Turning the page to chapter two will let us learn the basics of JavaScript.

Other chapters will learn you how to use the DOM to manipulate the document and style of the web page. Also, a chapter about animation is included and that is not widely covered in JavaScript books I’ve read. In the last chapter you’ll use the discussed techniques to build a web site extended with JavaScript and of course the DOM.

I didn’t buy the book because I wanted to learn about the DOM, but more as a reverence and a source of inspiration to learn new techniques. The reverence part was satisfied by a nice chapter at the end of the book, including all DOM methods with details on how to use them. However, this book is not a great source of inspiration for a bit experienced front-enders.

The book explains very well on how and why to use graceful degradation, separated behavior and markup and backwards compatibility. For beginners that is really cool, I haven’t seen many newbie JavaScript programmers use those techniques and it is really good they are given good information on this subject. But as said, anyone who knows those techniques already will not be satisfied by this book.

You’re new to JavaScript and DOM, and are interested in this book? I can really recommend it for you. I think you might be want to read the preview at Google Books, or the sample chapter at the official website.

A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

That’s what the cover says about Steve Krugs Don’t Make Me Think!. I bought myself a copy of this book, since I got interested by various other web designers who own this book as well.

The first chapter directly explains the title of the book, it is the first law of Krug: ‘Don’t Make Me Think!’. Leading is the task to get rid of all questions users of a web site can have when they visit it, like ‘What’s this?’ and ‘Can I click on that?’.

The other chapters are written in the same clear way as the first chapter: to the point. Krug did a good one on that: he explains most of the content with good examples.

The diversity of the content is also nice: chapter five is about text writing, and chapter three explains how to design web pages for scanning. In the same way chapter seven tells how to design a good homepage, and nine how to test with users.

I’m happy that I’ve bought it.

Modern, accessible, unobtrusive JavaScript explained by means of eight real-world example scripts.

That’s what the cover says about ppk on JavaScript. I have got this book on my bookshelf for a while, but a few days ago I had to do some JavaScript work so this book was a nice tool working on that project.

The cover is quite right about the content of this nice book. Peter-Paul organized the book in the same way as his web site, QuirksMode. Good explanation of the browser support (e.g. the warning ‘Browser incompatibilities ahead’), very useful but this information will be out-dated in a year.

What I like about this book is the structure: just scripts you could write yourself, but with all the explanation about how it works, what to do and better: what not to do. All essential JavaScript ‘basics’ are explained using these scripts as example.

But I also have some points of criticism… what I disliked about the book is mostly the usage of colors. The only color used is the blue on the cover, but that’s it. Source of the scripts is printed in an unreadable gray color and headers would be much better recognizable when a different color was used.
I think this book better for people who know some JavaScript already. In my opinion it’s pretty good, so read to check out yourself…