This book is completely devoted to patterns, or to what the authors call patterns. In the book, the authors advocate so-called customer-centered design, which emphasizes customers and their tasks above all else. This is an important shift. No matter how trivial it sounds (and indeed how trivial many of the book’s formulations, recommendations, or even patterns sound), it has real consequences.

The book is well written, the text is lucid, and the pictures are many and all in the right places. The book is structured into three parts. Part 1, “Foundations of Web Site Design,” provides a very useful introduction to the authors’ approach to Web design. Part 2 presents a description of Web design patterns. Part 3 contains the appendices. As the authors point out, it is neither necessary nor expected that one will read all of the patterns sequentially; after all, there are 107 of them in total.

The authors should be commended for creating this book, which contains a great deal of information. It will be invaluable for Web professionals, eager to create sites. They may not all be winning, but they will definitely be sites that their customers will be satisfied with.