On the strength of this review, I recently bought a copy of this book and read it. While I will grant that it's a perfectly adequate book, and might help some people, it definitely did not work for me, for the following reasons:

1. It is extremely basic. If you know anything *at all* about graphic design or web design you will find little here to enlighten you. I've read just a little bit about graphic design, and a little about color theory, and know my way around fonts, and so those chapters imparted no new information to me. Similarly, I didn't need to be told what jpg, gif, and png mean, or what the difference between a 2-column layout and a 3-column layout is.

2. The coverage on every topic is relatively shallow. For $40 (though it's true that you can get it more cheaply on Amazon), I would like to get a bit more than these 160 pages with loads of images and remarkably little text.

3. The author, while doubtless a great guy, is clearly very young and not by any stretch of the imagination an expert in the field. His writing is a mix of collegey triteness and Dummies-guide goofery that ends up saying very little and reads like he's talking down to the reader. Which is unfortunate, because if his intended audience is people who design "web sites that work absolutely perfectly but just don't, well, look very nice", then his target audience is probably people who are way smarter than him and would really appreciate more useful info and fewer embarrassing photos of the author and his own web site.

4. The quality of the images in the book itself is low enough that the illustrations intended to support the points he's making often fail to do so. The paper quality being what it is, many areas that are supposed to illustrate fine use of patterns and shading just look like smudgy abysses.

All that said, I don't want to pan the book completely. The author does know what he's talking about, even though it's essentially all first-semester stuff. And there are lots of nice examples of other people's sites that illustrate design principles. There are lots of tips for using Photoshop that, assuming you own Photoshop but don't know how to use it, might be useful to you. But all in all, I would say this is a book for a rank beginner in designing web pages. If that's you, you might get a lot out of it. It just wasn't me.