Mobile Design and Development: Practical Concepts and Techniques for Creating Mobile Sites and Web Apps (Animal Guide) Review

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(More customer reviews)Original review written by Pasquale Granato, JUG Lugano, [...] First of all, let's clear the field from a possible misunderstanding: this book is not about general mobile design and development but it is about web mobile development. The author states a precise, despite arguable, opinion that brutally said is: do not code native applications but prefer as much as you can web applications. This statement is largely discussed across the book and everyone can make up his own opinion about this. Mine is that currently times are not mature to consider to write just web applications both because mobile browser are not powerful enough (on average) to assure a smooth experience on all devices and because of the lack of a good way to make money from your web app.
The first three chapters of the book are a really good introduction to the history of mobile, to the mobile current status and to the reasons that should drive an approach to the mobile development. These chapters are a well written recap of the status of the art and present a lot of data useful to understand the global situation. Unfortunately the book is printed in black and white and several pie-charts and graphs are pretty much impossible to read.
The central part of the book, chapters from four to ten, is devoted to design issues and, despite the lack of an in-depth examination of some subjects, offers a pretty good survey of the topic.
The final part of the book is slightly more technical covering topics such as XHTML-MP, CSS, HTML5, device adaptation, etc. The problem here is that there is nothing really practical and all remains at an introductory level. To give you an example, a capital topic in device adaptation like Media Queries is covered in half a page with just a trivial example. Furthermore the author seems to be unaware of things like XwapProfile or UAProf (that is probably a obsolete and unreliable method but deserve at least a notation).
My biggest complain is anyway about the author's obsession for the iPhone. The Apple's jewel is referenced continuously and always with great glorification: the word iPhone recurs 99 times in the book and out of the 115 pictures in the book as many as 37 depict an iPhone. An entire chapter is devoted to iPhone web applications development even though most of the concepts presented here are common to other modern devices.
This is overall a decent introductory book, if you are completely new to the field, and it's packed with many good advices but do not expect much from the practical techniques promised by the title.

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Mobile Design and Development by Brian Fling is a start to finish guide for designing and building mobile apps regardless of experience, device or platform. Brian took on the daunting challenge to write the mobile guide missing from bookshelves. As Brian describes it "this is a book that teaches people how to cook, not a collection of recipes."Since its release the book has been incredibly well received. It has being described as a "must have" by many experts in the mobile community. The 16 chapters, and 85,000 words within the book have helped thousands understand and dive into mobile.The first half is a crash course in the mobile ecosystem: how to develop a strategy, address the mobile context--even how to decide which of the multiple mobile application types is best for you, and finally, how to create a user experience for it. The second half is focused on using these principles to make a mobile website or web app.Mobile Design and Development is a comprehensive resource covering all aspects of the mobile ecosystem. The book covers a great number of topics, however each are described in practical and common sense way—making easy for anyone at any technical level to understand the inner working of the mobile medium.
A Brief History of Mobile
The Mobile Ecosystem
Why Mobile?
Designing for Context
Developing a Mobile Strategy
Types of Mobile Applications
Mobile Application Medium Types
Mobile Application Media Matrix
Mobile Information Architecture
Mobile Design
The Elements of Mobile Design
Mobile Design Tools
Mobile Web Apps Versus Native Applications
When to Make a Native Application
When to Make a Mobile Web Application
Mobile 2.0
Mobile Web Development
Mobile Markup
Mobile CSS: Cascading Style Sheets
Mobile JavaScript
iPhone Web Apps
iPhone Markup
iPhone CSS
iPhone Javascript
Creating a Mobile Web App
Web Apps as Native Apps
Tools and Libraries
Adapting to Devices
Device Targeting
Full Adaptation
What Domain Do I Use?
Making Money in Mobile
Working with an App Store
Mobile Advertising
Supporting Devices
Device Testing
Desktop Testing
Usability Testing
The Future of Mobile
If you're a web designer, web developer, information architect, product manager, usability professional, content publisher, or an entrepreneur new to the mobile, Mobile Design and Development provides you with the knowledge you need to work with this rapidly developing technology.

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Web Application Architecture: Principles, Protocols and Practices Review

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(More customer reviews)This book is an ideal text for providing intermediate-level web developers with a solid grounding in architectural principles and more advanced techniques. Before going into why I like this book I do want to offer one caveat - the authors' approach is towards the Model-View-Controller paradigm, and is based on Java Standard Tag Library, Jarkata struts and Apache. These are solid elements, but if you are working in a different environment you will not appreciate this book as much.
The historical material in this book is not fluff if you approach it with the intent to gain a fuller understanding of the major components of the Internet and web. This material is rich with details about why the core web technologies developed and evolved, including design choices the pioneers made in the face of constraints. In a subtle way this part of the book is a primer on design and architecture.
What makes this book so valuable is the non-trivial application that brings this book alive. This is a refreshing change from other books that use thinly contrived snippets of code or trivial applications. The code for this application can be downloaded from the book's supporting web site, which also contains errata (thus far there are only two entries), and articles that are valuable resources with or without this book.
Overall this is one of the better books on web application design and development, and one that dives into code and technical details.

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An in-depth examination of the core concepts and general principles of Web application development.This book uses examples from specific technologies (e.g., servlet API or XSL), without promoting or endorsing particular platforms or APIs. Such knowledge is critical when designing and debugging complex systems. This conceptual understanding makes it easier to learn new APIs that arise in the rapidly changing Internet environment.* Includes discussions of markup languages: HTML, the eXtensible Markup Language (XML), XHTML, eXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL), and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)* Contains exercises geared to constructing an advanced XML application that makes use of XML and XSL parsers* Explores emerging technologies: Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), industry-specific XML standards, Resource Description Framework (RDF), and XML query languages

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Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience (Animal Guide) Review

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(More customer reviews)Malone and Crumlish have done the user-experience design community an amazing service with this volume. It does the hard, rigorous work that most of us simply do not have time or dedication to do -- creating the first solid set of building blocks for designing socially driven digital platforms.
The book goes beyond the easy categories of things like "blogs & wikis" and breaks those and other compounds down into their essential elements, helping us make more informed and less platform-dependent decisions.
Design patterns are always challenging to produce, especially since designers inevitably nit-pick them to death. But these patterns are up to the challenge: they actually make sense, and I suspect will stand up handsomely to the persnickety-designer test. But even if you differ with some of their particulars, it's incredibly valuable to have the heavy lifting already done, so all you have to do is react, refine and "improve" for your own use.
More than a mere collection of patterns, the book doles out large helpings of hard-won wisdom from the authors and other veterans of the industry who have wrestled with the volatile, emergent nature of socially driven digital design.
If you're doing anything with social design, from being asked to create a corporate blog to enhancing the way employees share knowledge on your intranet, do yourself a favor and get familiar with Designing Social Interfaces.


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From the creators of Yahoo!'s Design Pattern Library, Designing Social Interfaces provides you with more than 100 patterns, principles, and best practices, along with salient advice for many of the common challenges you'll face when starting a social website. Designing sites that foster user interaction and community-building is a valuable skill for web developers and designers today, but it's not that easy to understand the nuances of the social web. Now you have help. Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone share hard-won insights into what works, what doesn't, and why. You'll learn how to balance opposing factions and grow healthy online communities by co-creating them with your users.



Understand the overarching principles you need to consider for every website you create
Learn basic design patterns for adding social components to an existing site
Rein in misbehaving users on an active community site
Build a social experience around a product or service and invite people to join
Develop a social utility without having to build an entirely new infrastructure
Enable users of your site's content to interact with one another
Offer your members the opportunity to connect in the real world
Learn to recognize and avoid antipatterns: emergent bad practices in the social network and social media space

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