Sitepoint has two new offers that will help fill your shiny new Apple iPad [or Kindle or other Nook] with some great titles covering web design, web development and programming and business.

5-For-1 Deal

For the low price of 1 digital book [$29.95USD] you can get 4 more free. The sale ends April 16 so head on over and check the titles. Unless specified, a purchase gives you access to the book in PDF, ePub and MOBI formatted downloads. They’ve created some common bundles based on themes but you can select from more then 30 available titles. Check out the sale and place your order.

Already Purchased? Download the new format FREE

It must have been from a past sale, but I had a few old PDF versions of SitePoint books on my harddrive. I had tried converting them to ePub myself and the results were ‘just ok’. The folks at SitePoint were smart enough to anticipate the desire to do this and kind enough to allow you to log into their site and download the alternate formats for digital books you already have purchased. An informative blog post with all the details.

Some Suggested Titles

I always hit a sale and get overwhelmed with options not knowing what to pick. Having not read all 5 titles I bought in the day since I bought them I don’t want to go so far as recommending something blindly, but here’s my thinking. It’s hard to go wrong with books by Derek Featherstone and Jina Bolton, or Elliot Jay Stocks or Rachel Andrew. I grabbed a title like jQuery: Novice To Ninja just to see how it was written. But there are some books covering novice, server side development or business related topics as well.

The web community lives in a world of numbers. Tools like Google Analytics, Mint, Campaign Monitor and others do a wonderful job of helping put concrete numbers in the hands of site owners allowing them to make informed decisions about their business.

Last week ReadWriteWeb had an article The Death of the Pageview which provided an overview of some ways the industry has moved from simple “clicks” or “views” into more meaningful metrics. While it is great that we can now measure campaign conversion rates or watch the cow paths form through the sites we build we must always ask ourselves if the analytics are measuring the correct things, or if numbers or trends can even help answer a particular question.

There are some interesting new things going on the world of web site layouts with CSS and JavaScript all the time. Tricks and tools to add to a client side developer’s arsenal for making flexible, content accommodating navigation, layouts and presentations. Though I wouldn’t give away any of our progress, I can’t help but wonder if sometimes the amount of work we ask a visitor’s browser to do is overkill. One way to shift this workload off the browser — without placing undo burden onto the site management staff or its budget by requiring a high level of technical expertise with each site update — is to move the it to an offline or backend CMS tool creating static code for publication. This is particularly useful when doing multiple site deployments with a similar theme or building different localized site versions where the need for flexibility in type doesn’t change from user to user, but from content update to content update or deployment to deployment.

Through the use of fairly simple to create build tools we can create ‘static’ CSS for deployment and consumption and trim the amount and complexity of layout code sent with each page.

Went though a draft of this in my head as a funny Q&A with myself — 19 questions asking if I’d need the newly announced device to help me get existing work done better or if I could expect to jump in tomorrow helping clients create content for a newly introduced publishing model all answered with a simple “NO”. Followed by question 20 “will I still preorder it?” answered with a “Probably”. What I realized as I typed it up was that it all came down to work value vs. consumer value. As someone who is a somewhat recent iPhone owner and a long time Apple laptop user there was no solid work value I could find in this new type of 3G computing device but there is still plenty of consumer value as a consolidation and update of devices we’ve seen before.

For a recent project I was given the task of creating a lightbox style help dialog. The dialog was intended to highlight content of an odd or unknown size in addition to the more controlled information box. Essentially a figure in the shape of 2 adjacent rectangles of variable sizes that needed to be highlighted. The backbreaker — the 8 sided popup needed a large, opaque & diffuse drop shadow to make it stand out off the content.

This was the perfect use case for CSS box-shadow, but its also a public facing promotional site that for good reasons couldn’t just thumb its nose atMicrosoft Internet Explorer. The value proposition for any new CSS property – to make things like shadows and gradients easy to develop and manage with one rule replacing old complex solutions – is lost if you still have to code for that old complex solution juggling multiple PNG images and layering in added markup. Still, that work sounded painful to write for IE6, IE7 & IE8 as well as Firefox, Safari and Chrome so I started looking for an alternative in the proprietary MS filters which are supported in Internet Explorer 5.5 and up.