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The book's title is misleading in that the Web sites under discussion are not "deconstructed" in any analytical or critical sense of the word. Weinman simply interviewed the authors and artists that worked on the sites, then described their methods and tools in an entirely admiring and sympathetic fashion. The selection of Web sites seemed parochial and sometimes inexplicable to me. At least a couple of the sites were authored by her friends or students, one was only a prototype with no real content, and several were downright ugly.
I learned a few useful tricks from this book, but overall I found it unattractive and technically shallow. The design is visually jarring and hyper-ornamented with colored text, boxes, and various bullets and gizmos. There are also way too many typos. The example HTML is reprinted as a run-on stream in narrow columns with no blank lines or indenting. The fragments of C code and CGI scripts get the same treatment and are virtually unreadable, not that the average purchaser of this book would know what to make of them anyway. There are considerably better books on Web site design out there for this amount of money.
-- Ray Duncan (duncan@cerf.net)
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Explanation of ERCB rating scale: No stars = unacceptable, 1 Star = marginal, 2 Stars = average, 3 Stars = above average, 4 Stars = exceptional.