Norman Walsh recently posted a link to Akiyoshi’s illusion pages. I’ve got to say these are really fantastic. They are excellent illustrations of the physiological factors that make our vision work the way it does.

I recently read Margaret Livingstone’s Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing, and although it’s not the sort of book I would have bought for myself (my mother gave it to me as a birthday present), it’s excellent. It made me a lot more aware of how human vision works and evolved – things I always had a general idea of, but not much in the way of specifics. This book really made a lot of those ideas a lot more concrete for me, and illustrated them with artwork and optical illusions that demonstrate them.

Recently, a bright orange book, with a beanied man on the front cover, arrived on my front verandah. I'm referring, of course, to Jeffrey Zeldman's new book, Designing With Web Standards, and the beanied man is none other than Zeldman himself. Forthwith, my mini-review of his book:

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from this book – all I knew was that it had sold out it's first printing, before I could get my hands on a copy. Having now read it from orange cover to orange cover, I feel slightly more qualified to comment.

OK, there, I've said it. O'Reilly's Safari Bookshelf is great.

I'd been thinking about giving Safari a go for a while, but it wasn't until Slashdot ran a review of it that I gave in and signed up for a 14-day trial.

I had some intial misgivings. I'm an avid technical book reader; I have a large library that dates back to the days of 8-bit microprocessors. I read myself to sleep every night with a book, often an O'Reilly one. How would the feeling of reading books on a computer compare to reading a paper book?