Fresh out of college, I worked with talented graphic designers who graduated from Kutztown University Communication Design. Hung Nguyen, an alum from Kutztown, was one of my early mentors when I worked briefly at Triple Strength.

When I picked Mastering Type: The Essential Guide to Typography for Print and Web Design off the shelf, I was excited that the author, Denise Bosler, is the professor of communication design at Kutztown. This book is a pleasure read. It starts out with a brief history of type, then progresses to letter, word, sentence, paragraph, page and screen. From kerning, tracking, leading, word spacing, aligning to legibility and readability, the book provides insightful guides and the best parts are the good-vs.-bad illustrations. Well done!

John Kane’s A Type Primer (2nd Edition) is an excellent read for beginners who are interested in typography. The book is clear, concise and filled with beautiful, practical illustrations. The author has over 20 years of experience in teaching typography and the book proved his credential. The last chapter on grid systems is pure gold.

I work with MODX Evolution the day I took on a new job, which is four months ago, at George Mason Law. Since the site already built out, I just needed to learn my way around the system. I knew enough to redesign the entire site with HTML5 and responsive layout. It was a daunting task, but MODX gave me the flexibility to accomplish my goal.

Now I am learning to build a site from scratch using MODX Revolution and Bob Ray’s MODX: The Official Guide is indispensable. Through almost 800 pages, Ray demonstrates his inside-out knowledge of MODX. Using the book as a reference, I was able to put together a CMS-powered site with the exact markups I had intended. I am now in love with Revolution.

Highly recommended if you want to learn MODX. Must-have if you develop sites using MODX.

As a new command-line user, I find Mark Sobell’s A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming an indispensable resource next to Google. I picked up a handful of Linux books, but this is the only comprehensive text that focused mainly on command line.

After reading the book from cover to cover, I have learned the power of using command line and how not daunting the black screen with white text appears to be. Part V, “Command Reference,” makes this book a must-have guide next to my office desk, especially with the cover of Mac OS X. Highly recommended.

New to Drupal? Ric Shreves and Brice Dunwoodie’s Drupal 7 Bible is a perfect starting guide. From the painless installation process to all the core features to customizations, Shreves and Dunwoodie make Drupal seems less intimidating than it appears to be. By using Drupal, one can set up a solid, powerful content management system without touching the codes.

I am fairly new to Drupal simply because most of the work I have done could be accomplished using WordPress. While both WordPress and Drupal are content management systems, they serve different purposes. The choice to implement one over the other is up to the web designers and developers, but to have both for us to use for free is a huge advantage.

This is the first book I read on mobile web development; therefore, I find the first few chapters to be very informative, especially the concise history of the mobile web. While I am familiar with the general mobile techniques, the book has tips that I find helpful like using Sencha.io Src to deliver optimized images with responsive web design.

While the discussions of incorporating mobile web with WordPress, Drupal and Joomla! are short (mostly involve activating plug-ins and modules), the book provided some valuable comparison between the three platforms to help readers pick the right one for the project.

Mobile web is clearly on the rise and us designers need to jump on the bandwagon. Even if you don’t work with WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal, James Pearce’s Professional Mobile Web Development provides a great introduction to one of the future’s most popular web browsing devices.

I picked up Peter Gasston’s The Book of CSS3 and read through it in almost five hours straight. I simply couldn’t put it down. CSS3 is, without a doubt, one of the core technologies that makes the web so exciting. From media queries to web fonts to transitions and animations, CSS3 brings quite a bit of flavor to not only the presentation but also the interaction to the web.

Through Gasston’s clear explanations and easy-to-follow examples, you’ll see the power of CSS3 in action, which can be used today in contemporary browsers. The last two chapters on “Template Layout” and “The Future of CSS” are intriguing to see where CSS is heading. Definitely a must-read for web designers and developers. Don’t take my word for it. Check out Gasston’s article on “The Future of CSS Layouts” to get a glimpse of you’ll get from The Book of CSS3.

I read the first edition of Ted Gioia’s The History of Jazz in 2005. At that time I just started to develop my passion for jazz; therefore, the book was informative and overwhelming at the same time. Since then I have spent a tremendous amount of time listening, reading and learning more about jazz and its history.

I intended to visit this book for a while and the release of the second edition is just perfect. Rereading The History of Jazz the second time with a bit of background as a listener makes me appreciate Gioia’s work even more. What a daunting task writing about the complexity of the music that refuses to stand still for over a century. Gioia took us way back to the early nineteenth century with a vivid opening scene:

An elderly black man sits astride a large cylindrical drum. Using his fingers and the edge of his hand, he jabs repeatedly at the drum head—which is around a foot in diameter and probably made from an animal skin—evoking a throbbing pulsation with rapid, sharp strokes. A second drummer, holding his instrument between his knees, joins in, playing with the same staccato attack. A third black man, seated on the ground, plucks at a string instrument, the body of which is roughly fashioned from a calabash. Another calabash has been made into a drum, and a woman heats at it with two short sticks. One voice, then other voices join in. A dance of seeming contradictions accompanies this musical give-and-take, a moving hieroglyph that appears, on the one hand, informal and spontaneous yet, on closer inspection, ritualized and precise. It is a dance of massive proportions. A dense crowd of dark bodies forms into circular groups—perhaps five or six hundred individuals moving in time to the pulsations of the music, some swaying gently, others aggressively stomping their feet. A number of women in the group begin chanting.

From there on Gioia takes us from New Orleans to Chicago to Kansas City and then to New York for lively musical analysis and concise but accessible portraits of eminent jazz figures as well as the overlooked artists who contributed to the ever-changing styles of jazz. Must read for anyone who is passionate about the story of jazz.

Besides Miles Davis, Clifford Brown is my other favorite jazz trumpeter. Unlike Miles’s work, which I have an extensive collection, I only own three Brownie’s albums, but I keep revisiting them again and again. His crisp, melodic phrasing and big, bright tone mesmerize me every time. Unfortunately Brownie didn’t make much recordings because he was killed in a car accident when he was only twenty-five.

Also unlike Miles, whose music and life had been documented in great lengths, Brownie only has one major biography. Nick Catalano’s Clifford Brown: The Life and Art of the Legendary Jazz Trumpeter is a short, but well-researched text on the jazz trumpet giant. From his childhood development to his beautiful personality to his virtuosity, readers can see how Brownie became one of the most influential trumpeters in the world of jazz. Catalano’s analysis of the Brown-Roach-Rollins collaboration is a must read.

Why Responsive Web Design? Ethan Marcotte explains:

As the past few years have shown us, we simply can’t compete with the pace of technology. Are we really going to create a custom experience for every new browser or device that appears?

The alternative is to make web site responses to the users’ device using three core ingredients:

1. A flexible, grid-based layout,
2. Flexible images and media, and
3. Media queries, a module from the CSS3 specification.

With clear illustrations and concise explanations, the three chapters covering the techniques alone can prepare readers to start making responsive web sites, but the equally delightful part of the book is to hear Marcotte’s views on “Becoming Responsive,” responses to the critics and insights on “mobile first” approach. An immediate-read for web designers.