In Web Redesign 2.0, Kelly Goto and Emily Cotler present a one-size-fits-all overview of web development they call “the Core Process.” It seems “the Core Process” is some kind of proprietary methodology, but it’s really just some good things to remember when working on web development projects—mostly common sense. There’s a lot of jargon, and the “2.0″ in the title gives you an idea of the authors’ desire to sound trendy and high-tech.
The list of contributing experts (heavyweights such as Eric Meyer, Jakob Nielsen, and Jeffrey Zeldman) might lead you to believe that this is an important book, but those sections seem like canned content that could be dropped into any book on web development.
Some of the technical information is really strange. In this excerpt the authors are trying to explain what an include is.
“An include (noun, not verb) is a chunk of text coded and stored separately but applied globally so that it only needs to be edited once. A JavaScript include is a repeating functionality. Rather than plugging the repeating code into every page, simply reference an external file that is saved on the server separately from the HTML page. No complicated nested frames are necessary.”
“Chunk of text?” Javascript isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when I think of includes, and I have no idea how frames got involved.
There are lots of positive reviews for this book on Amazon, so I could be totally wrong. This is definitely a book for scanning over coffee at Barnes and Nobel.