Aaron Gustafson

After getting hooked on the web in 1996 and spending several years pushing pixels and bits for the likes of IBM and Konica Minolta, AARON GUSTAFSON founded Easy! Designs, LLC, a boutique web consultancy. Aaron is a member of The Web Standards Project (WaSP), serves as Technical Editor for A List Apart, is a contributing writer for Digital Web Magazine and MSDN, and has amassed a library of writing and editing credits in the print world, including AdvancED DOM Scripting (Friends of Ed, 2007) and Web Design in a Nutshell (3rd Edition, O'Reilly). In addition to
appearing at Rich Web Experience, Aaron is a regular on the web conference circuit and is frequently called upon to provide web standards and JavaScript training in both the public and private sector. He blogs at easy-reader.net.

Photo by Cindy Li.

Presentations

Books

Accelerated DOM Scripting with Ajax, APIs, and Libraries

by Aaron Gustafson, Jonathan Snook, Dan Webb, and Stuart Langridge

If you're a web developer with previous JavaScript and DOM scripting experience, Accelerated DOM Scripting with Ajax, APIs, and Libraries is perfect for you to take your knowledge to the next level.

This book is about JavaScript and using the document object model—the conduit to the HTML document. This book is not about learning how to program JavaScript from scratch. It starts with the assumption that you have done some JavaScript development before and understand the JavaScript syntax. This book builds on that knowledge to give you a deeper understanding of DOM scripting and how to apply that to your projects. It uses this new understanding to describe what JavaScript libraries are and show you how they can be applied to your project. The book will also explain Ajax and how best to plan and apply it to your projects. It explains how to build simple animation objects for adding movement to elements on the page. There are straightforward examples that demonstrate the techniques used throughout the book.

JavaScript has seen a resurgence in popularity over the past few years, and with it has come an exploration of the power of the language as well as what it can do within the browser. This book will explain techniques new and old—such as closures, encapsulation, and inheritance—that many are using and how you can best apply them to your own projects.

By reading this book, you should have a greater understanding of how JavaScript works and be able to use advanced concepts such as closures and event delegation to build more flexible applications for the Web. You'll walk away with a greater appreciation for JavaScript libraries and how they can simplify and speed up your development. You'll also be able to implement Ajax effectively into your site, create special effects, use JavaScript libraries, and know how best to apply these libraries to your projects.

What you’ll learn
- Where CSS, HTML, and the DOM fit into modern scripting, and how to use them together effectively
- Object-oriented programming techniques for more efficient JavaScript coding
- How to use JavaScript libraries such as Prototype in your work
- How to build effective form validation into your applications using Ajax
- How to create mashups using APIs
- How to build dynamic user interfaces
Who this book is for

This book is for beginner to intermediate developers, and already have knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Table of Contents
1. The State of JavaScript
2. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
3. Object-Oriented Programming
4. Libraries
5. Ajax and Data Exchange
6. Visual Effects
7. Form Validation and JavaScript
8. Case Study: FAQ Facelift
9. A Dynamic Help System

Designing Web Navigation

by James Kalbach

Thoroughly rewritten for today's web environment, this bestselling book offers a fresh look at a fundamental topic of web site development: navigation design. Amid all the changes to the Web in the past decade, and all the hype about Web 2.0 and various "rich" interactive technologies, the basic problems of creating a good web navigation system remain. Designing Web Navigation demonstrates that good navigation is not about technology-it's about the ways people find information, and how you guide them.

Ideal for beginning to intermediate web designers, managers, other non-designers, and web development pros looking for another perspective, Designing Web Navigation offers basic design principles, development techniques and practical advice, with real-world examples and essential concepts seamlessly folded in. How does your web site serve your business objectives? How does it meet a user's needs? You'll learn that navigation design touches most other aspects of web site development. This book:
- Provides the foundations of web navigation and offers a framework for navigation design
- Paints a broad picture of web navigation and basic human information behavior
- Demonstrates how navigation reflects brand and affects site credibility
- Helps you understand the problem you're trying to solve before you set out to design
- Thoroughly reviews the mechanisms and different types of navigation
- Explores "information scent" and "information shape"
- Explains "persuasive" architecture and other design concepts
- Covers special contexts, such as navigation design for web applications
- Includes an entire chapter on tagging
While Designing Web Navigation focuses on creating navigation systems for large, information-rich sites serving a business purpose, the principles and techniques in the book also apply to small sites. Well researched and cited, this book serves as an excellent reference on the topic, as well as a superb teaching guide. Each chapter ends with suggested reading and a set of questions that offer exercises for experiencing the concepts in action.

Advanced Dom Scripting: Dynamic Web Design Techniques

by Jeffrey Sambells

DOM Scripting is a vital technique for web developers and designers to learn and master in the modern web development arena, for adding dynamic effects to web applications such as animations, maps, drag and drop, and more. At friends of ED, we kick-started the interest in this subject with Jeremy Keith's acclaimed book DOM Scripting (friends of ED 1590595335) And now, with AdvancED DOM Scripting, we're aiming to take the reader further-AdvancED DOM Scripting starts where the original DOM Scripting left off, assuming the reader has already mastered the basics, and taking them further, with countless real world tutorials. It is the first book to exclusively cover advanced DOM Scripting techniques, and reads like a wish list of must have dynamic web application features, including visual effects using JavaScript libraries, Ajax, Mashups using APIs, and much more.

Learning Web Design: A Beginner's Guide to (X)HTML, StyleSheets, and Web Graphics

by Jennifer Niederst Robbins

Everything you need to know to create professional web sites is right here. Learning Web Design starts from the beginning -- defining how the Web and web pages work -- and builds from there. By the end of the book, you'll have the skills to create multi-column CSS layouts with optimized graphic files, and you'll know how to get your pages up on the Web.

This thoroughly revised edition teaches you how to build web sites according to modern design practices and professional standards. Learning Web Design explains:
- How to create a simple (X)HTML page, how to add links and images
- Everything you need to know about web standards -- (X)HTML, DTDs, and more
- Cascading Style Sheets -- formatting text, colors and backgrounds, using the box model, page layout, and more
- All about web graphics, and how to make them lean and mean through optimization
- The site development process, from start to finish
- Getting your pages on the Web -- hosting, domain names, and FTP
The book includes exercises to help you to learn various techniques, and short quizzes to make sure you're up to speed with key concepts. If you're interested in web design, Learning Web Design is the place to start.

Bulletproof Ajax

by Jeremy Keith

Step-by-step guide reveals best practices for enhancing Web sites with Ajax
- A step-by-step guide to enhancing Web sites with Ajax.
- Uses progressive enhancement techniques to ensure graceful degradation (which makes sites usable in all browsers).
- Shows readers how to write their own Ajax scripts instead of relying on third-party libraries.
Web site designers love the idea of Ajax--of creating Web pages in which information can be updated without refreshing the entire page. But for those who aren't hard-core programmers, enhancing pages using Ajax can be a challenge. Even more of a challenge is making sure those pages work for all users. In Bulletproof Ajax, author Jeremy Keith demonstrates how developers comfortable with CSS and (X)HTML can build Ajax functionality without frameworks, using the ideas of graceful degradation and progressive enhancement to ensure that the pages work for all users. Throughout this step-by-step guide, his emphasis is on best practices with an approach to building Ajax pages called Hijax, which improves flexibility and avoids worst-case scenarios.

Web Design in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference (In a Nutshell (O'Reilly))

by Jennifer Niederst

Are you still designing web sites like it's 1999? If so, you're in for a surprise. Since the last edition of this book appeared five years ago, there has been a major climate change with regard to web standards. Designers are no longer using (X)HTML as a design tool, but as a means of defining the meaning and structure of content. Cascading Style Sheets are no longer just something interesting to tinker with, but rather a reliable method for handling all matters of presentation, from fonts and colors to the layout of the entire page. In fact, following the standards is now a mandate of professional web design.
Our popular reference, Web Design in a Nutshell, is one of the first books to capture this new web landscape with an edition that's been completely rewritten and expanded to reflect the state of the art. In addition to being an authoritative reference for (X)HTML and Cascading Style Sheets, this book also provides an overview of the unique requirements of designing for the Web and gets to the nitty-gritty of JavaScript and DOM Scripting, web graphics optimization, and multimedia production. It is an indispensable tool for web designers and developers of all levels.
The third edition covers these contemporary web design topics:
- Structural layer: HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 (9 chapters), including an alphabetical reference of all elements, attributes and character entities
- Presentation layer: Ten all-new chapters on Cascading Style Sheets, Level 2.1, including an alphabetical reference of all properties and values.
- Behavior layer: JavaScript and scripting with the Document Object Model (DOM)
- Web environment: New web standards, browsers, display devices, accessibility, and internationalization
- Web graphics optimization: Producing lean and mean GIF, JPEG, PNG, and animated GIFs
- Multimedia: Web audio, video, Flash, and PDF
Organized so that readers can find answers quickly, Web Design in a Nutshell, Third Edition helps experienced designers come up to speed quickly on standards-based web design, and serves as a quick reference for those already familiar with the new standards and technology.
There are many books for web designers, but none that address such a wide variety of topics. Find out why nearly half a million buyers have made this the most popular web design book available.

Principal - Easy! Designs, LLC