Responsible Responsive Design

A Book Apart #13

by Scott Jehl, Ethan Marcotte (Foreword)

Responsive design has immeasurably improved multi-device, multi-browser visual layout—but it’s only the first step in building responsively. Learn how to turn a critical eye on your designs as you develop for new contexts (what does mobile really mean?) and screen features, speedy and lagging networks, and truly global audiences. Serve the right content across platforms, and tune for performance. Scott Jehl tackles those topics and more, ensuring that the sites and apps you build today last far into the future.

Genres: Design, Nonfiction, Website Design, Programming, Technology, Web, Computers

188 pages, ebook

First published November 19, 2014

Reviews

[Aaron Chu · Rating 3 out of 5]

The much anticipated book is informative, but not exactly insightful. While Jehl is a respected engineer in the field, this book presents itself as a collection of quick tips and tricks that are familiar to the industry's mid-level developers; and perhaps a promotional publication of the Filament Group. The dead horse is yet again beaten by the famous RWD Boston Globe examples and BBC references. While it provides updates of the Web standards, the writing is conceptually dull and conflicting at times. It presents one JS library after another without providing much original or new insights. The writing emphasizes on Accessibility in the introductory chapter without providing much solution or depth of the topic throughout other than the occasional mentions of the alt and aria-hidden attributes in passing. This is definitely a book to keep on an engineer's shelve, but not necessarily a brain stimulant.

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

This gem of a book is a sobering reminder that "responsive design" doesn't just mean having your website's layout scale from the small-ish screen of this year's iPhone to the larger screen of this year's Macbook, both running on gigabit WiFi. Your product should embrace the heterogenous nature of the web, where you have no way of knowing your user's screen dimensions, device features, their own physical capabilities, or connection speed. With tons of concrete examples and generous links to further reading, this is a must-read for anyone building web apps for today's world.

[Davy · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.5) I think the first chapter about Responsible Design was the most pertinent to my needs. A large portion of this book is devoted to implementation and performance, which I wish I would have known before because I could have skimmed through it quicker.

After reading this, I'm going to go back to the original A Book Apart: Responsive Web Design book (that just recently got updated) and try to get as much complementary info as I can. I think the first chapter met my needs, but the latter parts of the book is extremely useful for my front-end companions.

[Venkatesh-Prasad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unlike other books about responsive design from A Book Apart, this books goes into details of how to accomplish certain responsive design goals while being responsible about user experience in terms of performance, compatibility, and limiting information. That said, a reader with no or very little web development experience might not fully appreciate the contents of this book. Also, with advances in recent browsers, it is possible that some or many of the strategies laid out in the book may be redundant.

All said, if you are looking for a book to learn how to be responsible with responsive design, then this is a good start.

[Sercan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although it is 3 years old, this book still has a lot to offer for programmers. Very well organised and the tools that are introduced in this book are still effective. This point shows the accurate estimation of the author.

[Lucas Cherkewski · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid central message, examples (understandably) a little dated but still relevant.

[Marcel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Accessibility and performance are often an afterthought when developing websites, unless you're a major e-commerce shop where every additional millisecond in page load time and every lost user result in less conversions.

I've been following the work of Filament Group for some time and was a big fan of their book "Designing with Progressive Enhancement" which I think every web developer should have read, so many of the topics discussed in this book weren't entirely new to me.

I think that many of the best practices presented here are essential for public-facing websites and sites that provide content rather than functionality. With the rise of web apps it's hard to say if all the principles of progressive enhancement can be applied to single-page application as well because, honestly speaking, that's kind of hard.

Things like feature detection and supporting older browsers and devices is an expensive trade-off if you want to move fast and ship often. It would have been interesting to hear the author's opinion on whether that's feasible or not, and how Filament treats web apps compared to sites that can work on a bare-bones HTML construct as well.

Then again, the book series focuses on conciseness and effective delivery of the most important bits of information. In this respect, Scott Jehl did a decent job and inspired me to be more diligent, systematic and thorough when it comes to developing and delivering responsible web experiences, even though we all know that can sometimes cause a lot of headaches :)

[Radimir Bitsov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Astonishing book about responsive design and definitely one of the best I've ever read on that topic. Highly recommend it as it will lead you through the best practices of delivering the content and the resources for your web pages. All sections present practical advices and already proven solutions. In an addition all reference links used in the book are nicely organized after the final chapter.

[Tim Kadlec · Rating 5 out of 5]

Full review here: http://timkadlec.com/2014/11/book-rev...

The short version is that it's a fantastic book firmly rooted in real-world knowledge. It should be on the shelves of web developers everywhere.

[Francesco · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty technical. A good read but there are a couple parts of the book where it appears that actual content is missing. See pages 40–43 and pages 138–140.

This made some critical parts of this already technical book very hard to follow.

[Corey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scott's book, Responsible Responsive (Web) Design is, simply put, one of the finest writings on Web Design and Development ever authored.

[Trevan Hetzel · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE most relevant book for front-end developers in 2015.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

An exceptional book that answers a lot of questions I had about responsibly creating responsive websites. I have so much to do and practice now, and I can't wait to get started.

[derek allard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of good advice here. Was expecting a bit more but definitely some good nuggets.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really good. Flew through it. I didn't learn much to be honest but it's a really good modern summary & reference for Web performance best practices. Scott threw in a few terrrrrible jokes as well :)

[Craig Cecil · Rating 3 out of 5]

You've probably seen the content in this book elsewhere.