CS3172 > Res > Readings > Reference Books

J. Blustein

Web-centric Computing

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Reference Books

Resources: [Software | Readings | Websites]
Readings: [Articles | Textbooks | References ]

If you want more reference material than is included in the list of websites in the resources section then you might find this list of textbooks the professor uses helpful. Remember that some of the books and articles listed here are on reserve at the Killam library.

• References
  • Web Technologies in General
  • XHTML
  • CSS
    • Design Issues
  • HTTP
  • CGI
  • Perl 5
  • Servlets
  • Web Services / Web 2.0 / Asychronous JS + XML
  • DOM
  • Metadata, tags, and the Semantic Web(s)
  • The Web Graph
• See Also

Web Technologies in General

• XHTML 1.0 Web Development Sourcebook: Building Better Sites and Applications

  by Ian S. Graham

  ©2000 by the author.

  Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

  ISBN 0-471-37486-5.

• XHTML 1.0 Language and Design Sourcebook: The Next Generation of HTML

  by Ian S. Graham

  ©2000 by the author.

  Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

  ISBN 0-471-37485-7.

Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML)

• XHTML 1.0 W3C Recommendation

• HTML 4.01 W3C Recommendation

• XHTML 1.0 Language and Design Sourcebook: The Next Generation of HTML

  by Ian S. Graham

  ©2000 by the author.

  Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

  ISBN 0-471-37485-7.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

• Cascading Style Sheets: Designing For The Web

  by H. W. Lie and B. Bos.

  Published by Addison-Wesley.

  (2nd edition)

  ©1999 Pearson Education Limited.

  ISBN 0-201-59625-3.

  (This is a great book!)

  (3rd edition)

  ©2005 by the authors.

  ISBN 0-321-19312-1.

  (This is even better than the second edition, but the second edition is perfectly suitable too.)

• Bulletproof Web Design: Improving flexibility and protecting against worst-case scenarios with XHTML and CSS

  by Dan Cederholm.

  ©2006 by the author.

  Published by New Riders.

  ISBN 0-321-34693-9.

  (There are fewer pages here than in Eric Meyer's books but, although it is somewhat less complete, it is easier to follow and slightly more basic. If you only read one CSS tutorial book then this should be the one. Also, I think it is worth the publisher's price.)

• Eric Meyer on CSS

  by Eric A. Meyer.

  ©2003 by New Riders Publishing.

  Published by New Riders.

  First edition: July 2002

  ISBN 0-7357-245-X.

  (There is no CSS problem that Eric Meyer cannot solve. He (and Tantek Çelik) understand CSS like no one else. He is an outstanding presenter. His two books on CSS are packed with detailed practical advice and teaching.)

• More Eric Meyer on CSS

  by Eric A. Meyer.

  ©2004 by New Riders Publishing.

  Published by New Riders.

  ISBN 0-7357-1425-8.

Design Issues

• User-Centered Website Development: A Human-Coputer Interaction Approach

  by Daniel D. McCracken and Rosalee J. Wolfe

  ©2004 by Pearson Education, Inc.

  ISBN 0-13-041161-2.

  (All of the basics of user centred design applied to the website development.  Some parts, such as those about visual organization, are particularly good.  But other sections are weak (as one must expect from such a thin book).  The accessibility chapter is broad but shallow for example.  Great for an introductory course or for a lone learner looking for an extra resource.)

• User-Centered Web Design

  by John Cato

  ©2001 by Pearson Education Limited

  ISBN 0-201-39860-5.

  (Very good section on visual design.  Good advice in section on useability [sic] testing.  Otherwise rather weak.)

• The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web

  by Jesse James Garrett

  ©2003 by the author

  Published by New Riders & American Institute of Graphic Arts

  ISBN 0-7357-1202-6.

  (Especially suitable for managers. If you've never thought about design before or want a comprehensive overview of process and technique before reading a second book then this is the book to get.)

• Designing with Web Standards

  (2nd edition)

  by Jeffrey Zeldman

  ©2007 by the author

  Published by New Riders & American Institute of Graphic Arts

  ISBN 0-321-38555-1.

  (Don't judge this book solely by its cover — the content and presentation are much better than you might be led to expect.  This book is most suitable for a graduate of this course or a practitioner who needs to get most (if not all) of the details right for production systems.  I recommend using this along with Dan Cederholm's Bulletproof Web Design (see above) for solid work-arounds and advice.)

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

• HTTP: The Definitive Guide

  by David Gourley and Brian Totty (with Marjorie Sayer, Sailu Reddy, and Anshu Aggarwal).

  ©2002 by O'Reilly and Associates.

  ISBN 1-56592-509-2.

• Web Proxy Servers

  by Ari Luotonen.

  ©1998 Netscape Communications Corporation.

  Published by Prentice Hall PTR.

  ISBN 0-13-680612-0.

• XHTML 1.0 Language and Design Sourcebook: The Next Generation of HTML

  by Ian S. Graham

  ©2000 by the author.

  Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

  ISBN 0-471-37485-7.

• Web Protocols and Practice: HTTP/1.1, Networking Protocols, Caching, and Traffic Measurement

  by Balachander Krishnamurthy and Jennifer Rexford

  ©2001 by AT&T Corp.

  Published by Addison-Wesley, Inc.

  ISBN 0-201-71088-9.

  (This may be the only book that can compete with Ian S. Graham's XHTML Design book for the network part of the WWW that CS 4173 used to cover. It is detailed and lucid.)

Common Gateway Interface (CGI)

• Official Guide to Programming with CGI.pm: The Standard for Building Web Scripts

  by Lincoln Stein

  ©1998 by the author

  Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

  ISBN 0-471-24744-8.

• XHTML 1.0 Language and Design Sourcebook: The Next Generation of HTML

  by Ian S. Graham

  ©2000 by the author.

  Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

  ISBN 0-471-37485-7.

• Perl for the Web

  by Chris Radcliff

  ©2002 New Riders Publishing

  ISBN 0-7357-1114-3

  I haven't started to use it yet, but it looks like this book has good coverage of advanced applications of Perl to the WWW.

Perl 5

• Programming Perl (3rd edition)

  by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, & Jon Orwant.

  ©2000 by O'Reilly and Associates, Inc.

  ISBN 0-596-00027-8.

• The Perl Cookbook

  by Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington.

  ©1998 by O'Reilly and Associates, Inc.

  ISBN 1-56592-243-3.

• Network Programming in Perl

  by Lincoln D. Stein.

  ©2001 by Addison-Wesley

  ISBN 0-201-61571-1.

• Perl 5 Pocket Reference (2nd edition)

  by Johan Vromans.

  ©1998 by the author.

  Published by O'Reilly & Associates.

  ISBN 1-56592-495-9).

• Various articles in The Perl Journal (ISSN 1087-903X).

• Perl: The programmer's companion

  by Nigel Chapman.

  ©1997 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

  ISBN 0-471-97563-X.

Servlets

• Core Web Programming (2nd edition)

  by Marty Hall and Larry Brown

  ©2001 by Sun Microsystems, Inc.

  Published by Prentice Hall

  ISBN 0-13-089793-0

• Programming the World Wide Web

  by Robert W. Sebesta.

  ©2002 by Addison-Wesley

  ISBN 0-201-70484-6

Domain Object Model (DOM)

• The Web Wizard's Guide to DHTML and CSS

  by Steven G. Estrella

  ©2003 (Addison Wesley)

  ISBN 0-201-75834-2

  I haven't started to use it yet, but it looks like this book has good coverage of applications of Javascript/JScript to the DOM.

Metadata, Tags, and the Semantic Web(s)

• 

  Tagging: People-powered Metadata for the Social Web

  by Gene Smith

  ©2008 (by the author)

  Published by New Riders (an imprint of Peachpit, a division of Pearson Education)

  ISBN 978-0-321-52917-6

  As the redoubtable Peter Morville wrote on the back cover A clear and credible guide that integrates identity, prescence, reputation, relationships, and conversations into the modern practice of user experience design. Expensive but worth it.

Web Services / Web 2.0 / Asychronous JS + XML

• Web Services: Concepts, Architectures and Applications

  by Gustavo Alonso, Fabio Casati, Harumi Kuno, and Vijay Machiraju

  ©2004 (Springer-Verlag)

  ISBN 3-540-44008-9

  Wow! I never thought I'd find a book from Springer that was good and good to teach from. This is an outstandingly clear and appropriately detailed text.

• AJAX and Web Services

  Mark Pruett

  ©2006 (O'Reilly Media, Inc.)

  ISBN 0-596-52853-1

  Dollar for dollar and page for page, this is the greatest bargain book on its twin topics. It is tiny and dense but very clear.

  If you like to learn from examples than this may be the book for you: it probably has the highest example-to-description ratio of any book in this list. If you know the background, or can figure it out fast, then this is the book for you.

• Understanding AJAX: Using JavaScript to Create Rich Internet Applications

  Joshua Eichorn

  ©2007 (Pearson Education, Inc.)

  ISBN 0-13-221635-3

  I've only read chapter one so far but this looks to be a more than usually thorough treatment with many practical examples.

• Web Development with JavaScript and Ajax Illuminated

  Richard Allen, Kai Qian, Lixin Tao, and Xiang Fu

  ©2009 (Jones and Bartlett Publishers)

  ISBN 978-0-7637-5489-1

  Based on a quick look through this book: a great text for someone who wants to start knowing very little at the beginning of a one semester course about the WWW and end up being able to program Ajax, know a little about the Semantic Web, and have a smattering of other important and current (as of 2008) topics.

The Web Graph

• The Laws of the Web: Patterns in the Ecology of Information

  by Bernardo A. Huberman

  ©2001 (MIT Press)

  ISBN 0-262-08303-5

• Modeling the Internet and the Web: Probabilistic Methods and Algorithms

  by Pierre Baldi, Paolo Fransconi, and Padhraic Smyth

  ©2003 by the authors

  Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

  ISBN 0-470-84906-1

See Also

• List of course topics
• Safari Tech Books Online (the Dal FCS E-book collection)