With gorgeous designs, insightful essays, and comprehensive explanations, Ellen Lupton’s Thinking With Type is not only an essential but also a pleasurable reading on typography. The book is an excellent accompaniment to a course on type design because Lupton’s balances the theory and practice, at the same time, she manages to keep the texts short, straightforward, and accessible.

Divided into three main categories, Thinking With Type walks readers from the fundamental concepts of “Letter” (including size, classification, and families) to the arrangements of “Text” (such as kerning, tracking, and spacing) to the visual layouts using “Grid” (exploring single and multiple columns, modular, and data tables). The structures, illustrations, and exercises are well crafted to help readers enhance their use of type. While most typographic books cover mainly on print design, Thinking With Type deals with both print and web. Many beautiful screenshots of web sites are showcased throughout the book as well as a short coverage of “Web Accessibility” and “Web Hierarchy.”

Thinking With Type is a book that could be read from cover to cover because of the slim in size and simplified in language. Even the “Appendix” is filled with useful information, especially the free advices: “think more, design less,” “spend more, buy less,” and especially for screen designers, “make it bigger.” So buy it, study it, enjoy it, and most importantly, apply it. Still not convinced? Visit ThinkingWithType.com for excerpts.

The joyful part of web design is when the final Cascading-Style-Sheets-driven layout looks exactly like the Photoshop mockup; however, the joy ends as soon as the site goes into Browser Cam, and that’s when the hair-pulling part comes in. The beautiful site is no longer beautiful in Netscape 4.0. The main content is dropped below, instead of beside, the navigation in Internet Explorer 5.5. Why are there a few pixels off in IE 6.0?

After freaking out over the screenshots provided by Browser Cam, the next thing to do is revisit the CSS file and search the web for ways to fix the bugs. Getting frustrated because there isn’t a central place to find all the hacks. Fortunately, Joseph W. Lowery recognizes it, and puts together an accessible reference for designing cross-browser compatible websites called CSS Hacks & Filters: Making Cascading Style Sheets Work.

Because of the concise explanations, clear visual demonstrations, and well-organized contents, CSS Hacks & Filters is the book to have on hand when testing and debugging web pages and CSS files. From filtering CSS for older or hiding it from newer browsers to integrating layouts to building menus to troubleshooting, this is a one shop for all CSS-workarounds resource. Every hack or filter we need is well documented and usually accompanied by a web address if it was pulled from a particular site.

The strength of the book is Lowery’s easy-to-follow writing style. The language is simple and the instructions are comprehensible. For instance, the step-by-step breakdowns of the commented backslash hack for Mac IE is easy to understand, and the simple method to wrap texts around a cursive image is easy to pull off. Lowery is also a Dreamweaver expert; therefore, Dreamweaver users get a special treat at the last two chapters.

I am a designer, not a hacker, and hacking CSS is not my style. I prefer clean and lean style sheets, but in order to design a beautiful table-less layout website to work consistently on various browsers, hacking CSS is inevitable. Until CSS works the way it is supposed to, CSS Hacks & Filters not only saves the designers as well as developers tremendous time, headache, and effort, but also helps crafting their websites to reach wider audiences.

If I have to learn CSS from scratch, I would start with Hakon Wium Lie and Bert Bos’s Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web. CSS is easy to learn, but to understand how to use it correctly is a bit challenging. In order to take full advantage of CSS, designers need to know how each element was built, and what purpose it serves. Who else can show us these things better than CSS creators themselves?

The best part about this book is not how to use CSS, but how it was created to handle certain tasks. For example, the em unit is developed to make scalable style sheets. The creators describe the thinking behind it, and prove why we should always use ems to set font sizes. Their clarification on using ems over pixels is making much more sense to me than ever before. The short background on em is interesting to read, and clearing up some confusion as well.

Even though the book does not delve into advanced techniques such as styling a menu or design a complex tableless layout, it nails the fundamental concepts to the ground. From “CSS Selectors” to “Space Inside Boxes” to “Relative and Absolute Positioning” to “Colors,” the explanations are clear and the theories behind the elements are invaluable. The authors also remind us to “know when to stop” by keeping our styles clean and simple.

Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web is an important book to learn CSS the proper way. With the third edition, the book covers all the features in version 2.1, making it the definitive guide. Even though I have been using CSS heavily in my work, I still find the theories (what each element was created to do) to be intriguing. My favorite reading is the chapter on “the CSS Saga,” in which the authors give a brief history on CSS and how browsers play an important role in it. Believe it or not, Microsoft Internet Explore 3.0 was the first browser that supported CSS.

After Charles Wyke-Smith answered a lengthy question on CSS, his friend told him, “You should put this all in a book – I’d buy it.” Through his connection with an editor at New Riders, Wyke-Smith landed himself a book deal.

Like many CSS books on the market, Stylin’ with CSS introduces web standards, XHTML, and of course CSS. Wyke-Smith explains how CSS works, how to style text, how to create page layout, and so forth. Since the book offers nothing new or unique, isn’t it a bit too late to come out with a beginner CSS book at this time?

In Wyke-Smith’s introduction he writes, “Stylin’ with CSS is all about designing and building Web pages that look stylish and professional…” Yet the examples provided in the book are anything but those two elements. Although the book is not about design, and the main focus is on CSS, the author should at least try to create something visually appealing to attract the designers. The example does not have to be like a Zen Garden piece, but a simple layout with a nice use of type is good enough. Unfortunately, the screenshots provided in the book turn me away. The pages look as if they were designed in 1994 – when the author first started designing for the web.

If Stylin’ was published a year ago, it might make some impact, but it is too late now since there is an array of well-written CSS books already published. From a designer standpoint, I have no need for this book. Why should I learn to create something that does not pull me in? Besides, the raw tutorials covered in the book could be found online.

Web feeds have changed the way I visit websites. I just subscribe to my favorite places and watch new contents roll into my desktop aggregator (NetNewsWire). Feeds have not only saved me time, but also kept me on top of things. Why do I need TV when I can get the latest news from CNN delivered right to my computer? I no longer need to check Zeldman.com every morning to be disappointed that he only writes once in a while. Zeldman is still “da man” though.

Even though I offer a content syndication feed (RSS 2.0) on this site, I never have to write a code for it. WordPress does all the magic for me, and I am grateful for that. I probably won’t ever have to hand rolled a feed, but it is still helpful to know how to produce one. I picked up Ben Hammersley’s book, and it is all that I need to get myself familiar with the development process.

Coming straight from O’Reilly’s press, Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom is guaranteed to get readers roll up their sleeves and start rolling their feeds with its slim in volume, clear in explanation, and concise in coding approach. Whether developers need to roll out an Atom, RSS 1.0, or RSS 2.0, they can find the solutions in this book. Feeds can be created with PHP, Perl using XML::RSS, or Ruby. Hammersley offers step-by-step guides for all three. Besides the coding, the most important lesson from this book is the understanding of the differences between various RSS’s and Atom. Readers need to know the standards, and how they work in order to parse them. While feeds are mostly found in blogs, chapter 10 (“Unconventional Feeds”) shows what feeds can do beyond the blog community, such as Amazon Wishlist to RSS, Google to RSS with SOAP, the W3C Validator to RSS and Podcast Weather Forecasts.

We have a fantastic web developer in-house who I turn to all the time when I need PHP help, but if my boss ask me to create an RSS feed for no reason, I won’t pull my hair out. I just snatch the feed from WordPress, and modify it to suit our need. Why not create it from scratch? Why should I? Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom already gave me what I need to know. Since I already know what I am doing, modifying codes are faster for me than starting from scratch. It’s all about speed and precision, baby.

In his book Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of Hip-Hop Generation, Jeff Chang drops it like it’s hot. From MCing to DJing to b-boying to graffiti writing, Chang’s insightful knowledge of hip-hop culture combined with his passion for rap music make this book an important read. For those, including me, who not only love the art, but also want to learn what it was like living in the Bronx – birthplace of hip-hop – during the ’70s, this book will guarantee to supply a vivid reading experience.

The history of hip-hop is intriguing, stirring, and empowering. From the blackout riot on July 13, 1977 to the period when Clive Campbell (DJ Kool Herc) hooked up his father’s powerful system for the first time, the genuineness of Chang’s filmic structure provides readers with clear visual presentation of the subject. Whether he describes a scene of b-boy dancing or graffiti painting, his straightforward approach and natural style allow the images to be accessible.

On a personal level, I praise Chang for staying on point when he delves into the racial issue between Black American and Asian American. On his controversial “Black Korea,” Ice Cube voiced his opinion against Asians, accused the storeowners (Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Chinese and Cambodian) of trying to take over the hood. Not only on this particular piece but also throughout the book, Chang is recapturing, not recreating, the chronicle of hip-hop through his extensive research and personal interviews.

Although Can’t Stop Won’t Stop is longer than 500 pages, I couldn’t stop once I started to read. Chang’s work has enriched my knowledge on hip-hop, its elements, and its political contents. Hip-hop has made its way into the colleges’ and universities’ curricula. Even a highly selective private institution like Vassar, which is dominated by a Caucasian student body, is embracing hip-hop culture by introducing Hip-hop 101 club. Therefore, I would not be surprised to see this book as part of a required reading list.

I am impressed with Aimee Phan‘s writing. Her debut fiction collection, We Should Never Meet, which featured stories that are told with cinematic scope, leads readers back to the Viet Nam War period and lets them witness those forgotten victims who were the products of the war. Phan’s tightly crafted style allows her individual characters to create a coherent experience.

The book opens with a birth-delivering scene in Viet Nam, and then flashes back to the mother’s childhood, where Miss Lien (the young mother) used to play with her siblings on the family’s rice paddy. Phan jumps back and forth between the present and the past, but still manages to retain her readers’ attention through her simple and accessible writing. From the beautiful rice field to the midwife’s black-lacquered teeth, she effortlessly permits her descriptive style to come to live. As someone who was born and raised in My Tho, which is near the Mekong Delta, the first story, “Miss Lien,” is like a trip down memory lane for me.

In the next story, “We Should Never Meet,” Phan flies us to Los Angeles to introduce Kim, a con lai (Amerasian) orphan who is struggling financially to move out of Vinh’s place. Vinh is her ex-boyfriend, who is also an orphan, and a member of a small Vietnamese gang in Little Saigon. From one story to the next, Phan alternates her settings from Viet Nam to America, but her language is constructed in a clever way that each episode could be read alone or interlaced with one another.

Phan’s technique of telling a story out of sequence is both intricate and innovative. Her skills lie in the subtlety of the connectivity and the ability to flow from one scene to the next. She gets me scratching my head on how I should tell the stories if I were the writer. Should I start off with “Emancipation” where Mai graduates from high school, then move to her best friend Kim (“We Should Never Meet”), and then switch to her nemesis Vinh (“Visitors”)? After the American scenes, should I take readers back to Viet Nam into the “Gate of Saigon,” then to “The Delta,” and so on? That sounds like fun. I should do it when I have completely forgotten about the book, but to erase these unforgettable stories would take me at least ten years.

What is the beauty of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) design? Check csszengarden.com. What are the benefits of using CSS? Check csszengarden.com. What do they mean by separating contents from presentations? Check csszengarden.com. Wow! How do they do that? Check The Zen of Design, Visual Enlightenment for the Web, by Dave Shea and Molly E. Holzschlag.

On May 8, 2003, the CSS Zen Garden website proves to the world the power of CSS-based design. Now the book is here to provide the thinking processes behind the works, and how designers take advantage of the powerful and flexible technology to produce complex visual presentations on the web. The heart and soul of the book lies in the deconstructions of thirty-six carefully selected submissions. These examples not only inspire us, but also support the design concepts and the layout techniques presented by the authors. The thirty-six pieces are arranged into six categories: the “Design” that makes our jaws drop; (Ballade); the “Layout” that makes us glance (prêt-à-porter); the “Imagery” that makes us wonder (What Lies Beneath); the “Typography” that makes us marvel (Blood Lust); the “Special Effects” that make us feel hungry (This is Cereal); the “Reconstruction” that makes us realize how coding could be easy and fun (Hedges).

The pleasurable and insightful reading section of the book is where the authors explore the design principles. The descriptive writing is clear, and the screenshots beside the texts help readers more easily visualize the materials. One of my favorite pieces is the psychological use of shapes behind Radu Darvas’s Zunflower. As explained in the text, “Circles are most frequently associated with feminine: warmth, comfort, sensuality, and love, and the extension of those associates… Triangles are thought to be masculine, expressing qualities such as strength, aggression, and dynamic motion” (57). Darvas uses triangles and circles to give his design a sense of harmony. The outcome is a “sensual image, one that is both masculine and feminine, and that creates a very memorable emotion” (57). Although the layout of Zunflower is minimal, the level of attention to detail makes it a perfect selection to showcase the striking visual design and the legible use of typography. I am only scratching the surface here. The book delves much deeper into essential design elements, such as the appropriate use of shadow, the influence of color, and the art of using pattern.

Beside the visual design aspects, the technical explanations behind the sites are impressive as well. To keep the writing clear and focused, the authors leave out CSS 101, and cover the important codes that crafted the visual presentations. For instance, some of the topics include the various implementations of FIR (Fahrner Image Replacement) techniques, the different layout methods (fixed, fluid, vertical, horizontal), the tricks to pull off curved edges, and the use of inheritance, layering, and child selectors of CSS.

The Zen of CSS Design opens with an introduction (pays homage to the Web Standards, explains the general rules of markups, and views the source codes of the set-in-stone Zen Garden’s XHTML file), and closes with sites’ reconstructions to provide readers hands-on experiences. Dave, Molly, and New Riders have published a book on web design that I would like to see more of. The perfect balance between visual and codes describes web design today. A website is no longer an adaptation of a print design or a piece of programming without images. Web design nowadays is the combination of both sides, in addition to many more considerations such as accessibility, usability, and compatibility. My appreciation goes out to not only Dave and Molly, but to anyone who has contributed to the Zen of CSS Garden project. Your work helps making the web a better, faster and prettier place to access information.

Ho Xuan Huong’s skillful wordplays have always intrigued me. She was famous for composing poems with both thanh (“pure”) and tuc (“obscene”) contents at once. Using noi lai (“phrase reversals”) and taking the advantage of word tones, she was able to paint perfect pictures as well as provocative imageries with her poetry. For instance, the last line of “Qua Mit (Jackfruit)” reads, “Xin dung man mo nhua ra tay ([Please don’t] caress me [or] sap will slicken your hands).” I am wondering where does the word Jackfruit comes from? Just kidding!

While surfing through the Browsing Collection at Vassar College Library, I was thrilled to spot Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong still features on the current interest shelf even though the book was published in 2000. I am delighted to see her work is exposed in the West and I appreciate John Balaban for his incredible efforts.

The book features forty-nine selected poems from Ho Xuan Huong, written in Nom (calligraphic script), Vietnamese, and translated into English by John Balaban. Although the second meaning (tuc ) is lost in translation – even he admits it in his introduction – he has done a phenomenal job of transporting her poetry to the Western audience. His endnotes help tremendously in explaining her work to those who are unfamiliar with the Vietnamese language and culture. I wish the endnotes were printed below the English translations for better reference even though they would distract from the visual layout of the book.

Before reading this book, I did not know we had a script writing system similar to Chinese calligraphy called Nom. In Balaban’s introduction he states that only about thirty, out of seventy-six million, Vietnamese could read Nom. Isn’t that remarkable? Speaking of the introduction, he does a great job of giving a brief summary of Ho Xuan Huong’s biography.

Ho Xuan Huong is an amazing poet and her work deserves to be known. John Balaban has made it possible by making the translations available. Furthermore, the reprinting of Nom characters, which original used by Ho Xuan Huong, alone is worth the price of the book. Spring Essence: The Poetry of Ho Xuan Huong is highly recommended for a pleasure experience.

Once a spanking new technology introduced to the world, I usually turn to the Visual QuickStart Guide first. When it comes to learn the basic concept of a program, nothing beats the Visual QuickStart Guide series and Mark Spencer’s Motion for Mac OS X is no exclusion.

Spencer assumes that you have never opened Motion before, so the first two chapters give you a quick glance at the program. Then he moves into Motion’s Objects, including the interface, timeline, and properties. Once you feel comfortable moving around, he will walk you through the goodies of Motion, such as Behaviors, Filters, Generators, and Particles. With the book’s concise style and Spencer’s simple instruction, you will be no stranger to one of the most powerful motion graphic tools on the market.

One of the advantages of Motion for Mac OS X is its depth of 504 pages. The book is a great reference whether you need to learn immediately how to create keyframes, work with audio, use templates, or produce title sequences.

Apple Motion is not too difficult to learn and once you understand the fundamental concept, you’ll be able to create professional looking motion graphics for only 25 bucks. The affordably priced is what I like best about the Visual QuickStart Guide series; learn a new software fast without put a whole in my pocket.