You'd think that any book selling itself as "a common sense approach to web application design" in 2007 would feature serious consideration of accessibility. After all there's been major legislation in just about every country in the western world in the past year covering accessibility, and plenty of publicity about inaccessible sites like Target.

But there's not a single mention of accessibility in this book, and worse still many of the examples given are actually *bad* practice. Like locating error messages after form controls, for example, using placeholder text in form controls, or using javascript for essential functionality.

Even without this oversight the book can't be recommended. At times it felt like the author was trying to impress the reader with how much he knows, going into irrelevant detail about a lot of the theory, pretty much ignoring his own advice about keeping things as simple as possible.

If you want to learn about web usability buy Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think, and if you want to learn about getting a web application to market go visit http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ and read Getting Real for free.