Book Review: Smashing Book #2

[Saint_Michael 3]

In volume two of the Smashing book series, we are introduce to ten more chapters from the boys and girls of the Smashing Magazine Network. Here the web designers tool set is greatly expanded in which topics of graphic design, mobile design, wireframing, psychology, and even e-commerce are discussed. At a comfortable 335 pages this book will show you how difficult a web designers life really is due to the fact that there are a lot areas a web designer needs to cover from the first meeting to the client to going live.

Like volume #1, Smashing Book #2 condenses a lot of information you would find on their website and the various they have published as well. This is due to the fact that each chapter presented in this book can be a book in itself and once again they provide a great starting point for their readers and of course provide fresh prespective on what to think about when it comes to designing website. This book is only a year old, so the information presented is not totally outdate and so you can breath a sigh of relief because of it. Obviously, the point of the book is get you thinking and go out and research mroe about the topics and thus really build up your experience on the various ideas and concepts that are presented in here.

Of course, one thing I do like about this book, is that the information is easy to read and understand and can be reference back to. Of course, once you log into their website, the information they bring daily will quickly dwarf the book by hundreds of pages. As they continually talk about those topics and thus if they were to add that information into the book, it could easily triple in size. Another great aspect of this book I like is the artwork for each chapter as they really pop with the use of vivd colors and great design. On top of that, at the beginning of the book you find almost 3000 names of people who have bought this book and those pages are all designed in a large S.

I would defintely pick up this book to add to your collection of great web design information, especially if you have Smashing Book #1 and I will point out that Smashing Book #3 is coming out soon so you should defintely add that to your collection when it comes out later this year.