I had the chance to get a .pdf copy of the new Smashing Magazine folks book (I’m very happy by the way) titled “The Mobile Book”. I have bought all previous books from Smashing Magazine (Smashing Book 1, 2, 3 and 3 ½), and I can say without hesitation that this one is the best they have published so far.
The book has 3 main chapters:
- The Mobile Landscape
- Responsive Web Design
- UX Design for Mobile
I will not write about each chapter in the book, but I will stop in chapters I and II `cose I believe these to be the best and more interesting of the book containing some information we don’t see much.
In The Mobile Landscape the authors share with us useful information that I`m pretty sure we didn’t know (or at least that is what happened to me). This information shows how the mobile industry Works, from operators, device vendors, mobile OS and of course Browsers. Once you’ve read this chapter you will understand why the author says “Never assume anything on mobile”.
Also in this chapter we have a little info on the future of mobile also very interesting for people like me that are not updated on the technology world. All the info in this chapter is very useful and necessary to understand the mobile world.
In chapter II – Responsive Web Design – I want to mark the difference with others books (from Smashing magazine and other publishers) `cose we do not only have “the code” that show us how to do it, but it has a lot of possible solutions when designing for mobile, so for those (like me), that are not yet fully immersed in this “new” world, we can see and learn what our designers and developers colleagues are doing.
Another useful thing, that we don’t get much (or at least I haven’t seen) is optimize for mobile, this chapter is much more technical (this may prove more difficult for us designers), but things are easy to implement and probably have never had them in mind.
Anyways, I think this book, as I said at the beginning of the review, is an outstanding book, it is totally worth the money, and it is totally recommended, so think about adding The Mobile Book to your Bookshelf.