Author: Shelley Powers
Publisher: O'Reilly, 2008
Pages: 656
ISBN: 978-0596515096
Aimed at: Techie web designers
Rating: 4
Pros: Easy to read
Cons: Idiosyncratic choice of material
Reviewed by: David Conrad

Starting off from the basics of imaging - colour, JPEG, GIF and PNG - this book takes us on a grand tour of the graphical web. It's not complete because, despite it being a big book, the subject is even bigger.

Some of the chapters barely scratch the surface of their subject mater - Chapter Three on Photographs is merely an introduction to the topic. We then have some chapters dealing with design but with techincalities such as thumbnailing throwin in.

By Chapter Six we are into the second major topic of the book - vector graphics and SVG in particular. Chapter Seven is an SVG bootcamp that should be enough to get you started. Then we have some tricks with CSS, another excursion into design and Dynamic web pages (DHTML and the DOM).

Then we return to SVG and vector grahpics by way of canvas and scripting SVG. The book concludes with a random selection of topics - ImageMagick, Geographical data and mapping and data and graphics in general.

What is difficult is to say exactly what this book is about. Most of it seems to cover vector graphics but the style is chatty and informal and the thread tends to range over general design topics. The big problem is that despite being a standard SVG support is very patchy even among modern browsers. Perhaps the world has moved on and vector graphics are best implemented in Flash and Silverlight which this book mentions but doesn't do justice to.

An interesting book that probably deserves a second edition to deal with some of the inherent problems in advocating vector graphics on the web and to cover some of the more recent advances.