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Collaborative Web Development Jessica Burdman, 1999 Addison-Wesley ISBN: 0201433311 List Price: $34.95 |
"I wouldn't recommend this book to people already working in the Web space. Web development has matured much beyond the point of this book. However, if you work for a brick-and-mortar company who is preparing to engage in a major Web initiative, this book could give you a good idea of what to expect from your internal team or a service provider, but please hire a project manager who has done more than read this book."Reviewed by Sarah Gilbert
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@ the reviewer |
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Sarah Gilbert is an information architect at XOR.
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This book's strength is also its greatest weakness. Jessica Burdman has written a highly accessible, easy-to-understand book about front-end Web development. She takes the reader step-by-step through acquiring the right people and process to begin a Web project. But, the book fails to teach about the much greater challenge of Web development -- managing a team so that the project meets its deadline within budget and without making everyone on the team miserable.
The book begins with the basics, such as defining the project and articulating its objectives. She also makes some helpful comparisons between Web development and other types of projects -- advertising or software development management, for example. Anyone working on a Web project would be served by her reminders that pricing models for the Web or standards for Web production do not yet exist.
After an introductory chapter, the book launches into Web team creation. Burdman describes the role of each of the team members and what skills they bring to the project. She also discusses the different points of view of each specialist and how they approach problems. In the following chapters she describes project planning and process, communication among team members, quality management, quality assurance and technology.
Burdman states in the introduction that the book is written for project managers or producers or "anyone who is responsible for putting together a Web team." Because this book is accessible to "anyone," it is also useful to no one. I would hope that any serious project manager or producer would already know much of what is in this book. At certain points, this book is so high-level that it is almost meaningless.
The chapter titled "Communication Issues" serves as a good example. Burdman writes: "Good communication is critical to every project… Good communication comes from learning, occurs over time, and must be practiced between people." This should be painfully obvious to anyone who has ever had a job never mind tried to launch a large, technically complex project.
The most useful part of this book could be the pre-prepared documents and demo software on the CD. These could serve as a decent checklist of deliverables and give readers some idea of what they should look like. The CD also provides an opportunity to test some software that is useful on Web projects, such as Microsoft Project and HomeSite.
I wouldn't recommend this book to people already working in the Web space. Web development has matured much beyond the point of this book. However, if you work for a brick-and-mortar company who is preparing to engage in a major Web initiative, this book could give you a good idea of what to expect from your internal team or a service provider, but please hire a project manager who has done more than read this book.
© Internet Technical Group
Last update: December 31, 2000
URL: http://www.sandia.gov/itg/newsletter/dec00/sarah_review.html