How To Use This Web Book

The web book has been designed for you to work in a progressive manner. I have tried to make the progression the most logical way that, in my opinion, you should learn about web development and technologies.

Site Functionality

As you look at each of the following steps, please take time out to practice any suggestions or functionality.

When scrolling, both pages will scroll together. Use the right scrollbar to see more content now.
It is assumed that anyone interested in reading this Web Book, in order to take advantage of the features it offers, will be using a modern, W3C standards compliant browser, with cookies, CSS and JS enabled.
There is no site wide navigation.
You will have to start at the beginning of the Web Book and work your way through, progressively, to the end.
The design should hold good down to 640x480 resolution but is best viewed at 800x600 or higher. Try resizing your browser's viewport and adjusting the text size.
If the content is more than you can view in your chosen resolution, you will have to scroll down to expose additional content.
To make it easier to read content and to assist you to identify the spot you are currently reading, hovering over paragraphs and lists will highlight them and increase the contrast.
Reading the material, you will come across abbreviations, such as CSS, acronyms, such as Ajax and definitions, such as XML Schemas. For the first instance of one of these in any given page, hovering over an item will show a tooltip with the full wording. Clicking on one will take you to Wikipedia for a full description. I hear some of you saying <abbr> does not work in IE! Well it does here in all versions of Internet Explorer above version 5.0. Keep reading.
You are able to navigate forwards and backwards through the book using the obvious links that are provided or by clicking the page curls, and at the foot of the pages.
At any time, you can bookmark a page by clicking the Bookmark this page link on the right page, if you wish to retire from a session.
Whilst a bookmark is set, if you try to navigate to any other topic page in the book, you will be automatically redirected back to your bookmarked page.
When you start a new session, you will have to remove the bookmark before continuing.
Notice that navigation links are moved whilst the bookmark is set.
Any links to external resources will be opened in a separate window. This is to allow you to continue reading whilst referring to the external resource.
Any links to internal resources will not open in a new window and will generally have a link back to the topic you were previously viewing.
Notice the tab on the left. Clicking this will take you to the Table of Contents. From there you can link to other content. Interestingly, no matter how many pages you link away from your Book Topic, you will always find a link back to the topic you were reading. This only works with JavaScript and Cookies enabled. Without these, you will just see a message reminding you to use the Browser's Back button.
When turning to a new page and you already have experience with the presented topic, quickly view the Best Practices on the right page. If you are comfortable with these best practises, I have added a reminder for you to feel free to turn pages and move on to the next topic. This will enable more experienced readers to move through the book quickly but I'm hoping some of you experienced and helpful people, will take time out to read the content in order to give me feed back so I can improve the book.
Also on the right page you will find a link that will allow you to Comment on the particular topic you are reading. My hope here is that, as a team, by giving me constructive feedback, we can make this web book a great place for us all to visit on a regular basis.
When you are in the comment section of the web book, you will find a link at the top of the right page to Return to book topic.

Feedback

Please send feed back if you feel my progression is not in the best order, or something is missing and I need to add an additional topic, or if you can see any way I can improve the books functionality/design.

In particular, if anyone finds a page in this book that does not validate correctly for markup (Strict XHTML), presentation (CSS) and accesibility (WAI or Section 508). Any spelling mistakes, grammatically incorrect statements and anything else you find that will help us improve the qaulity of this book, then please let me know.

Happy reading!

Best Practice

This web book is not your typical conventional web site design so take a few moments to practice and familiarise yourself with the usage steps provided before you progress.
Time spent here will be time saved later on.

If you know all this stuff then please turn to the next page

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