CIW Site Designer Certification Bible Book Review

Not many webmasters can say they have read a 600-page book about how to pass a certification exam that promises to boost their careers. Score over the required 75% and it may boost your ego as well. Besides discipline and patience, the CIW Site Designer Certification Bible by Natanya Pitts and Chelsea Valentine is all you need and more to get you past the challenge.

First of all, anyone taking the Site Designer exam must have already passed the Associates exam, the introductory level required before taking any of the CIW series exams. If after several attempts, you can’t pass the Associates exam, you might want to consider taking that brick and mortar job your father-in-law offered you. The goal should be to achieve the Master Designer certification. The path is as follows:

Associates > Site Designer > E-Commerce Designer.

The book is well written and organized, but you will need invest a fair amount of time to absorb the wealth of material. A slow reader, it took me three months to finish it. Exam Tip, In the Real World, and other icons help you brush past the extracurricular subjects and concentrate on the exam requirements. This comprehensive book is bound to cover some topics you already understand. Just as some tend to skip over the “begats” in the Good Book, you’ll want to forgo the familiar topics and concentrate on your areas of weakness. For example, you may already know how to make tables in HTML, so just review the chapter on HTML Tables and Page Structure and move on.

Whatever the book could have possibly lacked in substance, it made up for in durability. The hardcover edition is quite large and weighs 3 lbs. Be warned that people will give you strange looks if you sneak it into the bathroom. My copy still contains sand from beautiful Garden City Beach, South Carolina where my MCP brother pranked me by hiding a fake snake in the grass, which upon seeing it caused me to fly backwards and fall into the sand. I expected the book to be damaged as I lay there looking at the pitiful site splayed open and half-buried in the sand, but to my surprise, it sustained no major damage.

The contents of CIW Site Designer Certification Bible are broken into the four broad headings of Exploring Web Design Methodology, Understanding Web Site Design Technology, Using Web Site Development Tools, and Applying Advanced Design Technology. These four parts crudely translate to layout, HTML, the four design tools, and programming.

Each of the 21 chapters features a pre-test, key point summary, and a study guide that includes assessment questions, scenarios, and even lab exercises. I found the most valuable of these to be the key point summaries and assessment questions. The scenarios and lab exercises may be a bit of an overkill to intermediate and advanced webmasters.

The book was published in 2001 and some material is starting to show some age. The emphasis on the keywords meta tag is one example. Another is that the web site development tool versions have been updated since the book’s release. Attention to PHP was conspicuously missing; but then again, it’s not on the exam. Perhaps a revised standard version will be released.

I discovered the practice test software included on the CD ROM to be quite helpful in studying for the exam. It contained 296 questions atop the nicest test engine I have ever seen. It featured real time grading with tally of number of questions, number of correct vs. incorrect ratio, and a nifty graphic bar for percent correct indicator.

Over all, I’d have to say that passing the CIW Site Designer exam enhanced my webmaster life, not just my ego. It forced me to cement my knowledge of certain topics that I was too lazy to otherwise learn. Studying with CIW Site Designer Certification Bible greatly contributed my success. I can especially testify to this because I didn’t take any classes to prepare for the Site Designer exam. The only other tool I used besides the book was Self Test Software, Inc. (Kaplan Inc.) practice exams.

The CIW Site Designer Certification Bible doesn’t have gold pages or a colorful ribbon bookmark or leather binding. In it, you will find no creation story and no apocalypse. It will not enhance your spiritual life, nor can it compete with the 2000+ year old Holy Bible, but it may just make you a better webmaster. –Emory Rowland, 12/25/02

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