Smashing Magazine have come a long way. I’m sure many of us remember how they broke ground, paving the way for so many copycat websites. While they still have a place in their hearts for the occasional “round-up” post, they are now focused on publishing the best web design and development related content in the world.
In my opinion, now that they have branched out into print publishing and have drastically improved their review and screening process for authors and articles, I think they have overtaken the previous industry leaders and are now the #1 web development resource in the world. That’s not taking anything away from publishers like A List Apart, SitePoint, or others; those organizations have their niche, and they will continue to be big. But Smashing Magazine has, in my opinion, surpassed them all.
And with the release of Smashing Book #4 — New Perspectives on Web Design, they have now cemented their position in the web development community even further.
As it stands, I have not yet read this book. They gave me a free EPUB version to review. I don’t normally write book reviews for books I haven’t yet read, but based on the author line-up in this one (as has been the case in past SM books, most of which I’ve read), I can wholeheartedly recommend this new book to all front-end developers.
You can view the full table of contents on the official book page, but here are the chapters I’m particularly looking forward to:
- The Vanilla Web Diet (by Christian Heilmann)
- Culture of Performance (by Tim Kadlec)
- Finding and Fixing Mobile Web Rendering Issues (by Addy Osmani)
- Obscure Back-end Techniques and Terminal Secrets (by Paul Tero)
I also appreciate that the names aren’t just your typical web standards geeks and others we’ve seen and heard from for the past five years. There are some new names here that I’ve never heard of before, and I think that’s good for the community.
So yeah, this post is nothing but a plug for them because they gave me a free copy of their book. But if you know me, you know that I would never promote something I didn’t have complete confidence in. And yes, at $49 U.S the book is expensive. But where else are you going to find a line-up of authors like this?
Based on Smashing Magazine’s previous titles, and their growing reputation for producing better and better content each year, I think this purchase is well worth it.
