[Review] The Smashing Book

Nice review Sander, great descriptions about the chapters. I love reading the book to get some more indepth information about the work I do. Makes it that much easier to explain it all to my clients and myself, hehe.

On a side note; they really did disappoint me with their delivery times. From pre-order to actual delivery was like 5 months, ridiculous.

This article has been shared on favSHARE.net. Go and vote it!

Thanks Vince - for your comment. I agree with you on the waiting time, but sometimes some elements are out of direct control in order to live up to the expectations. Good to hear you are using the book in a professional manner, good luck and happy holidays.

Next time, have someone else write the article. It reads horrible. Typos and errors riddle this page.

Got my copy in the mail (after months of waiting as well) but haven’t started reading it. It’s so poorly designed from a publishing standpoint that it turns me off from wanting to. You have to apply so much force just to hold the book open wide enough to read anything, the text is too small, and the thickness of the paper and size of the book make it impossible to straighten out the pages while reading. They’re always curved towards the binding.

I’d review mine, but I have yet to actually receive it, you know, after nearly a month after it shipped, and a few months after it was ordered.

Complete lack of professionalism and forethought by Smashing Magazine team, and they’ll receive no such further support from me.

I thought the same thing about the book falling apart. I like how the “Dig Into WordPress” book that was just released in print is done in spiral binding. It might not be as pretty, but at least it won’t fall apart.

Even still I want to get this book.

The entire book project, from front to back, shows that the creators know a lot about online presentation and production, but rather little about print media.

All the delays, which print designers normally know to be aware of, pushed back their “anticipated” ship date by months.

The book is set in a sans-serif font … which is normally ideal for web, with its ~72 dpi resolution, but with print media > 300 dpi, serifs really make print matter more comfortable for the eye to read.

Also, in web, you normally make margins mirrored. It’s just obvious. But, with printed books, perfect-bound and other methods, mirrored margins are the way to go. You want to give the inner margin a larger amount of space than the outer, so that the reader doesn’t need to break the binding of the book, in order to read what’s on the inner part of the page.

All in all, I am quite content with the content (Grade: A+), and quite embarrassed by the presentation (Grade: C).

Edit: Also, in web, you normally don’t make margins mirrored.

Thanks for reviewing. I’d like to comment on it also but like so many others I still haven’t recieved my copy, and as a regular reader of their website I’m not that excited about getting the book as it sounds like I’ll have read most of what’s in the book already.

Thanks for the review. It’s speared me on to actually read mine. I’ve opened it once but not read any of it due to the rediculous size of the book.

I thought it would at least be A4/letter size. It’s a pain in the ass to keep the book open.

I’m sure though that the contents will be great though… when I read it

Nice review. Like other commentators here, I haven’t received my copy yet. I’m in the U.S., btw. Kinda disappointing, as I was hoping to read the book during my winter break before I return to work.

I am eagerly awaiting my copy but a bit surprised now that they didn’t research the printed book issues more thoroughly.

Isn’t that why we are all buying the book - to make sure we thoroughly research the web content design thoroughly ?

Perhaps they need to eat their own dogfood to quote a Google phrase !

Really nice book review. I’m still working on finishing the book and I plan on writing a review as well. I definitely agree with you about the size. I would love to see a bigger font and a bigger book.

A good idea is what Chris Coyier did with his recent book. He made it have a spiral binding. This would have been excellent to have for the SmashingBook.

Sander, thank you very much for the objective and professional review. You indeed provided a very extensive overview of the book, its content and its quality. Thank you for you time.

@Vince, @Dan Grossman, @Alex Blundell: we are aware that the whole shipping delays story was a big disappointment, it definitely damaged our reputation and we will have to regain it in 2010. We are aware that we made some unprofessional mistakes with the print, and we will do our best to make sure that next editions of the Smashing Book are professional from the traditional print publishing standpoint. 5 months was indeed a ridiculously long waiting time and we are aware that it was also our fault. We are already working on some improvements to make sure that it won’t happen again.

However, we think that we did a quite good job in terms of editorial and content. There are some light typing errors in the Table of contents, but apart from that the content should be a goldmine for designers and developers.

@Vin Thomas: your point ic valid, however you need to understand that our goal was to make the book affordable for everybody worldwide. $67 for print+pdf (“Digging into WordPress”) is a price that most developers from India can not afford. It was very important for us to keep the price as low as possible. Unfortunately, the result was that the binding wasn’t appropriate. However, we will improve the binding in the second edition.

@Design Informer: a spiral binding would drastically increase the price of the Smashing Book, and we didn’t want it to be expensive.

Overall, thank you for your feedback and comments. We pay attention to your feedback and we will make sure to improve the quality of our work in 2010.

Thank you Vitaly Friedman (editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine) - very much for taking the time to respond, very appreciated. I hope people can see beyond the form of the book and concentrate on its great contents, a true added value for the design and web-development community.

Thanks again and good luck, I’m sure it will be a Smashing 2010 for you and the team, keep it up!

Thanks Vitaly Friedman for your thourough reply, Regarding the cost if the book I actually agree with you. I have just moved house and had the book been much more expensive I would have definately thought twice about buying it. Put it into perspective really!

Thanks again

@kirkoconnor That’s NOT a Google phrase! It predates Google’s existence.

I got the book but I haven’t started reading it yet. After flicking through the pages, it looks pretty good, but I totally agree with others that the book is too small for this type of content and it’s not easy to lay on a table next to your computer if you want to follow examples.

I’ve also reviewed this book on my blog: http://rizwanreza.com/2010/01/08/the-book-that-smashed-my-expectations.

I do agree with what you say, but I thought of a better book from them. I know they’ve done a fabulous job with content and layout, but a design book should be everlasting.