August 2003 Computer Book Reviews

Ebay Business the Smart Way: Maximize Your Profits on the Web's
by Joseph T. Sinclair

AMACOM

ISBN# 0-8144-7202-8
Suggested Retail Price: $24.95 or as low as $8.72 from Amazon.com!

This is a practical, down-to-earth guide for the new eBay seller. Selling on eBay for the first time is an intimidating experience. There are so many new things to learn. How do I put a picture into my auction? How do I set my opening bid price? Should I use a reserve? What about taking credit cards?

The book has a lot of fluff, but for the newcomer it amounts to some welcome hand-holding. Mr. Sinclair talks a lot about the nuts and bolts of selling on eBay - how to prepare packages for shipping, how to photograph your items, where to get products to sell, and quite a bit more. Its one of the best computer books I've read in a long time. Very low jargon quotient to make it a comfortable read for the non-techie who wants to learn to use his computer to sell on eBay.

Gardner's Web Design Sketchbook

Garth Gardner Company

ISBN# 1-58965-009-3
Suggested Retail Price: $24.95

You're either going to love this item or you're going to hate it. Its a web page design sketchbook. Its a spiral-bound notebook filled with template pages that let you sketch out your page design, jot down notes about the resources you'll need for the page, and other details about the work. The value of these pages is truly an "eye of the beholder" judgement. To my mind, the book is too small to be practical for sketching, and I can include notes much more easily inside comments in my HTML code than I can by writing them down by hand in a notebook. But I'm a brute-force kind of web page designer. Just look at this site and you'll see what I mean. Its very simple. Few frills. We tell each story we have for you, and let you move on to the next one, easily and quickly. You would probably be better off with a handfull of typing paper.

www.advertising: Advertising and Marketing on the World Wide Web
by Richard Adams

Watson-Guptill Publications

ISBN# 0-82305-861-1
Suggested Retail Price: $29.95 or as low as $15.40 from Amazon.com!

This is an illustrated primer on how to create advertising and attractive marketing pages on the World Wide Web. I'm not talking about banner ads. I mean the real deal - the hard stuff: why some approaches work for one kind of product, but not another. Its got little technical details beyond describing the capabilities of tools like JavaScript, DHTML, Shockwave, Flash, and so on. Mostly its about visual arts - the presentation. There's a bold full-color illustration on every page. If you're looking for inspiration to jazz up your site, this is a great place to start.