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Basic Web Design

1. Netspace's Guide to Good HTML and the Bare Bones Guide to HTML
2. How to Redesign your site
3. HTML Quick Reference
4. Browser-friendly colors
5. "The Tag List"
6. Tools for WWW providers
7. Perl homepage (we recommend using Perl for cgibin work)
8. Server Side Includes (a quick cgibin method)
9. Search Engine Secrets

Useful Texts

About Web Design and Web Programming

1. Click Here! Okay, we're cheating, this isn't an O'Reilly text like the others, but it is the best web design book out there. Written by Lynda Weinman, it's an excellent hands-on way to make a good web site. Read this, and you'll put the RPG Web Services design team out of business :)
2. HTML: The Definitive Guide (3rd Edition) ($32.95) A good reference for writing HTML code for pages, and thus a fairly essential basic reference.
3. Learning Perl (2nd Edition) ($29.95) Perl is the language of choice for web programming. If you don't know how to write Perl, this small book is a fun read and an excellent way to learn the language.
4. Webmaster in a Nutshell ($19.95) This is a bit like a web encyclopedia-- it doesn't teach webmasters, but presents all the details you'd need so you can easily look them up.
5. CGI Programming on the WWW ($32.95) This book assumes you know programming in some language, and then explains how CGI programming works in detail. Perhaps a bit high level for the casual developer, but very useful for advanced work.
6. JavaScript: The Definitive Guide (3rd Edition) ($39.95) If you're going to use JavaScript (which we don't always recommend), this book lets you know what you can do. It's a bit slow going, and is intended as a reference for programmers (moreso than as a tutorial).

About dice.rpg.net and using unix

1. Learning the Unix Operating System (4th Edition) ($10.95) So maybe you've just been making pages at home and loading them onto rpg.net. But your account includes access to the unix shell, email, etc-- and this book will teach you how to use unix and the various tools in it. Highly recommended for unix novices.
2. When you can't find your Unix system administrator ($17.95) Okay, I confess, this books is more "what we sysadmins hope our users know". It's a fun read and useful if you want to get more involved in general unix work, but is only tangentially related to pure web work.
3. Stopping Spam ($19.95) A new book, this is really "what the rpg.net sys admins are doing", since most of it is about how we can make rpg.net more spam-free (spam being junk email). But it does have a useful section on ways you can personally get less spam, and is a handy for people very concerned with the issue of spam.

About the Internet

1. Internet in a Nutshell ($19.95) An excellent Internet overview. If you don't know what telnet or ssh or ftp really are, get this book. If you are interested in using browser plugins, wish to use chat rooms, or other matters, get this book. It's about the one book that really covers the real things you'll want to use.
2. Web Security & Commerce ($32.95) A bit dry, but an excellent book on the issues of web security, especially for commerce. This is useful if you want to really understand the matters of web store security, which in itself is a function of how involved you want to get in making your store. If you get a turnkey solution (i.e. someone gives you a working web store), you don't need to read this book-- but the person that gave you the store had better have read it!

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