Steve Jobs and .Net magazine’s top 25 books for web designers and developers
.Net magazine published its The top 25 books for web designers and developers after asking a few contributors and yours truly for our recommendations.
It’s a great list, with some great books and I’ve read and liked almost everything on the list. My three books were, with my commentary:
2. Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte
Ethan’s giving fluid grids, fluid assets and CSS3 media queries a collective name, ‘Responsive Web Design’ has changed the way that millions of people now see web pages.
11. Mobile First by Luke Wroblewski
Read in tandem with Responsive Web Design and you’ll know the shape of web design for the next five years.
Both are great (little) books and I wasn’t the only one to recommend them. But my third choice, Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, seems to have come in for some criticism.
Hilarious. @netmag recommend Jobs’ autobiography as a “must read” for web developers and designers.
Tweeted Ian Devlin who openly admits he hasn’t actually read Isaacson’s biography. Well Ian, if you don’t think Steve Jobs belongs in a list of recommended reads for web professionals, I’m sure there’s a good XSLT Cookbook out there for you somewhere.
That (and my ridiculous adoration) aside, I don’t need to justify my choice to Ian or anyone else and I’m standing by my recommendation because the book tells about Jobs caring passionately about the design of things that no one will ever see. I don’t think we need much of a mental leap between that and what web designers and developers should be doing every day.
And, as I wrote in my commentary:
As web professionals, we need to remember to keep doing the work we love and never settle.