A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web aims to teach you techniques for designing your website using the principles of graphic design.

Featuring five sections, each covering a core aspect of graphic design: Getting Started, Research, Typography, Colour, and Layout. Learn solid graphic design theory that you can simply apply to your designs, making the difference from a good design to a great one.

It is common to argue that intellectual property in the form of copyright and patent is necessary for the innovation and creation of ideas and inventions such as machines, drugs, computer software, books, music, literature and movies. In fact intellectual property is a government grant of a costly and dangerous private monopoly over ideas. We show through theory and example that intellectual monopoly is not necessary for innovation and as a practical matter is damaging to growth, prosperity and liberty.

Two new books now raise the question of whether Richard Feynman is rising to the status of superstar. The two books are very different in style and in substance. Lawrence Krauss’s book, Quantum Man, is a narrative of Feynman’s life as a scientist, skipping lightly over the personal adventures that have been emphasized in earlier biographies. Krauss succeeds in explaining in nontechnical language the essential core of Feynman’s thinking. Unlike any previous biographer, he takes the reader inside Feynman’s head and reconstructs the picture of nature as Feynman saw it. This is a new kind of scientific history, and Krauss is well qualified to write it, being an expert physicist and a gifted writer of scientific books for the general public. Quantum Man shows us the side of Feynman’s personality that was least visible to most of his admirers, the silent and persistent calculator working intensely through long days and nights to figure out how nature works.

"Remember also that such a pack would have to be small enough not to scare geeks away (or be graded somehow)…"

Erika Hall: "Nichomachean Ethics - Aristotle (350 BCE), Guns, Germs, and Steel - Jared Diamond (1997), The Age of Reason - Thomas Paine (1794), Paul Rand: Conversations with Students - Michael Kroeger (Conversations took place in 1995, book published in 2008), Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus - Mary Shelley (1818), Søren Kierkegaard's In Vino Veritas"

In the US, interest has been such that Knopf has already ordered a second print run. In the UK, Bethan Jones, of Harvill Secker, said inquiries from booksellers were running at 10-15 a day. "He is huge in Japan. Here he started out as an alternative, cult author. But this book looks as though it will be immense. It is really unusual for a book in translation, but we have produced a massive print run."

In writing a book, you’re going to find all sorts of interesting ways to mentally beat yourself up. You’re going to consider new tools and different writing schedules. You’ll discover that inspiration can be encouraged, but never created. You’re going to find constructive ways to procrastinate and your friends are going to stop talking to you because all you talk about is that damned book.

Super. In the meantime, let’s write.

The English chef who studied cooking in Sichuan tells us that there is no one Chinese cuisine, how Western perceptions of Chinese food are changing, and why carrots are called "barbarian radishes" in Mandarin

15-tab spreadsheet to help authors get organized (and stay sane!) around their book promotion. Tabs include: online promo, offline promo, advance copy distribution, book tour, etc.

I’ve chosen to deal with my anxiety by tapping into the wisdom of the hive mind. I recently sent email to the authors in my social network and asked them, “What do you wish you’d known about the process of writing a book that you didn’t know before you did it?”

After keen debate at the Guardian's books desk, this is our list of the very best factual writing, organised by category, and then by date.

Amazingly, when I reloaded the page the next day, both priced had gone UP! Each was now nearly $2.8 million. And whereas previously the prices were $400,000 apart, they were now within $5,000 of each other. Now I was intrigued, and I started to follow the page incessantly. By the end of the day the higher priced copy had gone up again. This time to $3,536,675.57. And now a pattern was emerging.

As a general rule, avoid Foo in 24 hours books – they are a waste of your money and time. They are usually awfully written, and a sketchy treatment makes most of topics that you are interested in a lot MORE difficult to learn. Don't concentrate on any specific frameworks or languages – it's perfectly OK to learn these on the go (if you work as a programmer your job will simply force you to do it). Learn the science.

Unbound is a new way of bringing authors and readers together. We believe both deserve a greater say in which books get published. Starting now, Unbound will make that happen. No middlemen or marketers. Just authors, readers and great ideas.

On a recent long jaunt around the Aegean, I realized something important about the Kindle: it’s the ultimate travel gadget.

What does it mean to be awake? What exactly is therapeutic about retail therapy? And what are you really working on when you're at your desk, in the gym, or having dinner? From getting ready in the morning, through heading to work, going to a party, having sex and falling back to sleep, Breakfast with Socrates provides an hour-by-hour commentary on what history's greatest philosophers have said about the meaning behind everything we do. A fascinating exploration of our daily lives, Breakfast with Socrates also draws on literature, art, politics and psychology to offer an informal introduction to the history of ideas that will help anyone to think more healthily. Breakfast will never be the same again…

Ryan Holiday: I have a bad habit where I put off reading a book if I hear it recommended too many times. It stems from being underwhelmed by the flavor of the week long read (normally The New Yorker) or whatever blogs seem to be passing around and splooging all over. In the case of Born to Run, I made a mistake and I wish I'd read it soon. No question it had plenty of the cringe-worthy moments I was reticent about, but it's worth reading anyway. Like The Tiger book, there is a shocking amount of applicable and interesting evolutionary science in here, and from what I know it's all pretty legit. For a non-fiction book about running, it's very readable and interesting enough to keep you going even if you are not a runner. This is also its weakness; you can tell the writer's background as a magazine writer resigns him to a sort of pull-quote mentality and all the other obnoxious tricks that magazines employ. The idea that we evolved to run long distance (as opposed to only sprinting when fleeing predators) is something that I don't think has been properly accounted for in paleo-communities. Persistance hunting, for example, is something he discusses well in this book. That Taleb and others advocate only walking and never distance running has not sat well with me--they've never felt the accomplishment of slowly seeing your endurance grow; the rhythm your feet, lungs, music and heartbeat fall into on a long run; the commitment it takes to hit a goal day in and day out. This book is about those things and how deeply rooted they are in us. And how, ironically, the industry that surrounds running has done its best to destroy and undermine those feelings.

Ryan Holiday: Holy shit this book is good. Just holy shit. Even if it was just the main narrative--the chase to kill a man-eating Tiger in Siberia in post-communist Russia–it would be worth reading, but it is so much more than that. The author explains the Russian psyche, the psyche of man vs predator, the psyches of primitive peoples and animals, in such a masterful way that you're shocked to find 1) that he knows this, and 2) that he fit it all into this readable and relatively short book. You may have heard about the story in the news: a tiger starts killing people in Russia and a team is sent to kill it. When he leaps at the leader of the team, the man's rifle goes into his mouth and down his throat all the way to the stock. The autopsy later revealed that the tiger had been shot something like a dozen times during its life and lived. Like I was saying, there are all sorts of well-selected threads from evolutionary psychology and biology in this book. Books like these are a self-educator's dream because you can pick and choose which ones you want to follow next--trusting safely that the author has pointed you in an interesting and valuable direction. But that's just the meta-stuff that is a bonus with this book, and it's worth pointing out only because the rest of the book is just so fucking interesting and exciting.

Ryan Holiday: This is one of the most important books about cities ever written. It's what helps you understand why cities work, why they don't work, what makes a neighborhood, what destroys neighborhoods and how almost everything city planners and governments think matters, doesn't. Seth Roberts is probably the biggest Jane Jacobs fan there is. He's what she calls an insider-outsider (insider in terms of understanding, outsider in terms of career) She was an activist and a student who understood the system but wasn't wedded to it or dependent on it for a living. It was this unique position that gave her the freedom and the perspective to explain the concept of American cities (and what's killing them) in a way that no one had ever done before. I also think that a lot of Jacobs' ideas about diversity, mixed uses, isolation, wealth and government can be applied to other parts of our lives. The way she gets to the core of neighborhood, passing up the easy or obvious signs that others are mistakenly distracted with, is impressive. There is a great Malcolm Gladwell article where he tries to use some of her ideas to dissect office culture--it's a good start and example about other canvases for her ideas.

So why am I blogging about this now when “Infinite Jest” was released in 1996? Partly, it’s because this year is the 15th anniversary of the book. And partly it’s because the phone call from the editor that flagged me to the significance of my interview with Wallace, reawakened my interest.

Danny Dorling: "Joe Moran is absolutely brilliant. He can take a subject that seems like the most boring and make it fascinating. If I had to recommend just one of these books about Britain, I’d say please read On Roads."

The film legend discusses books that have resonated with him, from JD Salinger to Elia Kazan and beyond.

From an era when 'self-help' books had genuine depth, Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People" has influenced the world. No book in the self-help category matters more than this one.

In the gap between Reality A and Reality B, in the inversion of realities, how far could we preserve our given values, and, at the same time, to what kind of new morals could we go on to give birth? This is one of the themes of the work. I spent three years writing this story, during which time I passed its hypothetical world through myself as a simulation. The chaos is still there — in full measure.

Suddenly, every time I walked into a bookstore or read a review, I started noticing similarly breathless subtitles. What had struck me initially as the odd unfortunate decision now began to look like a full-blown trend.

(I tried to write this list like a haiku—one swift stroke, top to bot tom, no revi sion. I’m sure that, upon reflec tion, there will be other books I want to include here. But aren’t the truly impor tant books the ones that don’t require reflec tion to sum mon up?—the ones that are sim ply… there?)

I find it increasingly difficult to read. This year I read fewer books than last year; last year I read fewer than the year before; the year before I read fewer than the year before that. The phenomenon of writer’s block is well known, but what I am suffering from is reader’s block.

From Here to There: A Curious Collection from the Hand Drawn Map Association

Evgeny Morozov: It’s fascinating reading because it brings together mostly historians of technology and a handful of philosophers, who approach the question of determinism from different perspectives. You have Marxist historians, economic historians, feminist historians, business historians, who look at the evolution of industry, all of whom are trying to answer the question of whether certain technologies influence the course of history and if so, how?

Evgeny Morozov: Technology became something of a subject, I guess, in the late 1860s/70s but it only really emerged as a field for academic study in the late 1930s. The most influential early book aimed at a popular audience was Technics and Civilization by Lewis Mumford, published in 1934. It touched the worlds of history and economics and, to an extent, political philosophy. Mumford tried to look back as far as he could and study how human societies incorporated various technologies, but also how they made choices about which technologies to take on, how to regulate them, and how those decisions ended up shaping societies themselves.

“Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!” is an odd title for a weird book. Not weird bad, just weird in a way that makes you stop and think about what precisely the author, Douglas Coupland, is up to. Like the man it chronicles, Coupland’s book is full of unconventional angles, ricochets and resonances. Rather than offering a doorstop-size addition to the Great Man canon, it comes in at just over 200 pages that nonetheless sprawl and unfold to their own idiosyncratic rhythm.

Award-winning statistician and political scientist Andrew Gelman says that uncertainty is an important part of life, and recognition of that uncertainty is itself an important step. This is where statistics can help us

The rare case of a decent how-to:<br />
<br />
"I shouldn’t be able to read most of the books on my shelf. I never took a single classical history class and I cheated through most of Economics 001. Still, the loci of my library are Greek History and Applied Economics. And though they often are beyond me educationally, I’m able to comprehend them because of some equalizing tricks. Reading to lead or learn requires that you treat your brain like the muscle that it is–lifting the subjects with the most tension and weight. For me, that means pushing ahead into subjects you’re not familiar with and wresting with them until you can–shying away from the “easy read.”<br />
"This is how I break down a new book."

via Rands: Parker’s defining character is Spenser, a well-educated, smart mouthed chef who also happens to be a private detective. Parker’s mysteries are uncomplicated and mostly irrelevant. Where Parker shines is a deep focus on characters and the conversations that tie them together. That strength is far more important than the whodunit. You will care about the characters Parker defines; you will laugh with them; and you will wonder how you can know a person, who you will never meet, so well.

via Rands: Like his column, it’s clear Cringley has layered a generous amount of fiction on the stories surrounding the defining moments of the likes of Microsoft, Apple, and Adobe, but it’s a delicious fiction. Who cares whether Bill Gates was arrested for reckless driving? It’s a set of compelling stories about the earliest days of our industry, complete with nerd heroes, egotistical, coke snorting jerks, and the continual expectation an amazing new product was always just about to be released.

via Rands: The Purpose: Think of Universal Principles of Design as 125 independent, digestible blog articles that provide convenient access to cross-disciplinary design knowledge. Like many of the books on this list, all you need to find value in this book is to open it… to any page. Why does highlighting matter? How much can a user actually remember? Why should I care about interference effects?

A book printed through a printing chain made of four desktop printers using four different colors and technologies dated from 1880 to 1976. A production process that brings together small scale and large scale production, two sides of the same history.

Imagine a book—in this case the 1934 novel The Street of Crocodiles, a surrealistic set of linked stories by the Polish Holocaust victim Bruno Schulz—whose pages have been cut out to form a latticework of words. The result is a new, much shorter story and a paper sculpture, a remarkable piece of inert, unclickable technology: the anti-Kindle. Reading it is a little like going through an FBI document full of blacked-out passages, except that the excised portions are now holes through which you get glimpses of subsequent text. The format slows your eye down (though it helps if you slightly lift the page you’re on), but the book is so brief that it can still be read in half an hour.

In the face of such odds, merely writing a novel must seem perverse. Self-indulgent, at the very least, if not financial suicide. The question is less whether the novel as a form is dying, or if the internet can offer a lifeline to certain writers. What cries out for explanation is the strange, persistent fact that millions of us spend years attempting something for which we are certain to see little, if any, reward. 

The internet’s most ruinous effect on literacy may not be the obliteration of long-format journalism or drops in hardcover sales; it may be the destruction of the belief that books can be talked and written about endlessly. There are fewer official reviews of novels lately, but there are infinitely more pithily captioned links on Facebook, reader-response posts on Tumblr, punny jokes on Twitter. How depressing, to have a book you just read and loved feel so suddenly passé, to feel—almost immediately—as though you no longer have any claim to your own ideas about it. I started writing this piece when the book came out at the end of July, and I started unwriting it almost immediately thereafter. Zeno’s Paradox 2.0: delete your sentences as you read their approximations elsewhere. How will future fiction work? Will details coalesce into aphorism?

Merlin: The Grandaddy of writing-as-craft books. Learn how making prose is like building furniture. You’re an engineer of words. Friend, you’ll close this book with a new obsession for tight and precise prose writing. I don’t pull it off every day (let alone every sentence), but it’s damned sure on my mind all the time.

Merlin: Just so very, very wonderful. Heartfelt, funny, and desperately useful, if only for learning “The Shitty First Draft.”

Merlin: Failures in non-fiction writing are almost always failures of process (especially during pre-writing). A must-buy for journalists (and serious bloggers).

Merlin: Shut off your monkey mind, get past discursive thinking, and keep that hand in motion. Like meditation, writing is a practice. You do it because you do it, that is why you do it.

Merlin:  Sounds like a BS title, but it’s not. Again: process. How to think and when. How to approach a daunting project sensibly by “parking on a downhill slope.”

No other jury verdict has had such a profound social impact as the acquittal of Penguin Books in the Lady Chatterley trial. Fifty years on, Geoffrey Robertson QC looks at how it changed Britain's cultural landscape.

The first phone book, published by the New Haven District Telephone Company in New Haven, Connecticut, appeared in February 1878. It contained 50 entries, a mix of individuals, government services, clubs, and most of all commercial enterprises. Phone numbers didn’t exist yet--at that point, if you had a phone, the operator at your local exchange knew who you were.

As the sales of e-books finally start to soar, what effect will this digital revolution have on publishers, readers and writers? Will the novel as we know it survive?

Recommended by Stephen Fry. This little book has already caused quite a sensation in the publishing world, and for good reason too. And you can read why from the blurb on the back of the book. It did generate a variety of effects for me. Each short tale leaves a slightly different taste to the previous one. Some you will want to savour and allow the flavours to linger, whilst others may have no affect at all. Not only do you get such a wide variety of ideas and concepts, but the prose is delicious! Writers generally acknowledge that the short story is more of a challenge. These are not really short stories, more ideas for films or something, but the writing is superb.

Ricky Rice is a middle-aged hustler with a lingering junk habit, a bum knee and a haunted mind. The sole survivor of a suicide cult, he spends his days scraping by as a porter at a bus depot in Utica, New York. Until one day a letter arrives, reminding him of a vow he once made and a summoning him to Vermont's remote Northeast Kingdom to fulfill it.

However a story can be easy to tell, and still be told badly. Another trot through the events, however breathtaking these events and however comprehensive the description, would have served no purpose; that’s been done before and done well, not least in the club’s Centenary Book. Where this book really triumphs is in identifying a new angle, a compelling angle, and pursuing it doggedly. Whilst Lionel provides a skeleton of detail that would permit those unfamiliar with the narrative to follow what’s going on, the joy is in the reflections, anecdotes and memories provided by the key players. So comprehensive is this coverage indeed that, other than Elton John, the most significant names not to have interviewed are the likes of Iwan Roberts, Worrell Sterling and Rick Holden. Everyone else is there, including occasional glances from the other side of the fence.

Throughout the following interview, which took place over two consecutive afternoons, he showed a readiness to laugh that was pleasantly out of keeping with the quiet of the office. He’s clearly a busy man and by his own admission a reluctant talker, but once serious conversation began I found him focused and forthcoming. He spoke fluently, but with extended pauses between statements, taking great care to give the most accurate answer possible. When the talk turned to jazz or to running marathons, two of his great passions, he could easily have been mistaken for a man twenty years younger, or even for a fifteen-year-old boy.

Professor Wolf has written a multidisciplinary book that is mind-boggling in its breadth. You'll learn everything from how writing and alphabets developed to why Socrates disfavored reading to how mental processes vary among dyslexics who are reading different languages to the best ways for diagnosing and overcoming reading difficulties.

This book is as vital today as it was when it was first published in 1954. An invaluable exploration of grossly distorted graphs, correlation/causation confusion, and sucky sampling.

There is a famous speech by Demosthenes that he ends by chiding his fellow statesman for their flattery. As was common in Athens, the speakers who’d gone before him had filled their orations with examples of great and proud moments in the country’s history like victories at Marathon and Salamis. This was a distraction, he said, a trick to tell the audience what they wanted to hear instead of prompting them into the action they desperately needed to take, which in this case was war. “Reflect,” he concluded, “that your ancestors set up those trophies, not that you may gaze at them in wonder but that you may also imitate the virtues of the men who set them up.”

Figment is a community where you can share your writing, connect with other readers, and discover new stories and authors. Whatever you're into, from sonnets to mysteries, from sci-fi stories to cell phone novels, you can find it all here.

Dan Cruickshank explains the beauty of Palladian proportions, takes us on a tour of some key English country houses, describes the poetry of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles and says Georgian Palladian architecture was Britain’s reaction to Catholic baroque.

The Memory Chalet is a memoir unlike any you have ever read before. Each essay charts some experience or remembrance of the past through the sieve of Tony Judt’s prodigious mind. His youthful love of a particular London bus route evolves into a reflection on public civility and interwar urban planning. Memories of the 1968 student riots of Paris meander through the divergent sex politics of Europe, before concluding that his generation ‘was a revolutionary generation, but missed the revolution’. A series of roadtrips across America lead not just to an appreciation of American history, but to an eventual acquisition of citizenship. Foods and trains and long-lost smells all compete for Judt’s attention; but for us, he has forged his reflections into an elegant arc of analysis. All as simply and beautifully arranged as a Swiss chalet — a reassuring refuge deep in the mountains of memory.

The book, that fusty old technology, seems rigid and passé as we daily consume a diet of information bytes and digital images. The fault, dear reader, lies not in our books but in ourselves.

The Montreal-based nonprofit Yellow Bird Project has worked with an amazing range of indie rock musicians over the years to create unique T-shirt designs, benefitting an array of charities. This all-new project - the first ever indie rock coloring book - enlists artist Andy J. Miller to create witty, hand-illustrated activity pages in a fitting tribute to the DIY spirit of the bands. Including mazes, connect the dots, and coloring pages for Bloc Party, the Shins, Stars, Broken Social Scene, Devendra Banhart, Rilo Kiley, the New Pornographers, the National, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and twenty more musicians, and all royalties going to charity, the "Indie Rock Coloring Book" is sure to keep music fans out of trouble for hours and warm even the coolest of hipster hearts.

"After Photography" examines the myriad ways in which the digital revolution has fundamentally altered the way we receive visual information, from photographs of news events taken by ordinary people on mobile phones to the widespread use of image surveillance. In a world beset by critical problems and ambiguous boundaries, Fred Ritchin argues that it is time to explore the possibilities created by digital innovations and to use them to understand our rapidly changing world.Ritchin investigates the future of visual media as the digital revolution transforms images into a hypertextual medium, fundamentally changing the way we conceptualise the world. Simultaneously, the increased manipulation of photographs makes photography suspect as reliable documentation. In the tradition of John Berger and Susan Sontag, Ritchin analyses photography's failings and reveals untapped potentials for the medium.

How do we see the world around us? The Penguin on Design series includes the works of creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision forever. Bruno Munari was among the most inspirational designers of all time, described by Picasso as ‘the new Leonardo’. Munari insisted that design be beautiful, functional and accessible, and this enlightening and highly entertaining book sets out his ideas about visual, graphic and industrial design and the role it plays in the objects we use everyday. Lamps, road signs, typography, posters, children’s books, advertising, cars and chairs – these are just some of the subjects to which he turns his illuminating gaze.

Dealing with the ultimate questions of life's origins, this study examines the pride, passion, and courage of the cosmological scientists who explore the origins, structure, and fate of the universe.

Negotiation is a way of life for the majority of us. Whether we're at work, at home or simply going out, we want to participate in the decisions that affect us. Nowadays, hardly anyone gets through the day without a single negotiation, yet, few of us are armed with the effective, powerful negotiating skills that prevent stubborn haggling and ensure mutual problem-solving. Fisher and Ury cut through the jargon to present a few easily remembered principles that will guide you to success, no matter what the other side does or whatever dirty tricks they resort to. They include:--Don't bargain over positions--Separate people from the problem--Insist on objective criteria--What if they won't play? (20021018)