VRML Books

This book provides a great overview of XHTML, from its origins and relationship to HTML, to adjacent technologies designed to work in conjunction with it. You'll primarily learn (1) how to migrate legacy HTML markup and (2) how to write new XHTML from the ground up. This book does well to cite available software to help you with both the conversion as well as the creation of XHTML. Towards the end of the book, the authors go into application-specific XML vocabularies and technologies designed to transform or style XHTML.

Novices will do great with this approach, but experienced web developers already knowledgeable with XML technologies may find the coverage of XSLT, CSS, etc. redundant with their other readings and/or life experiences. I've been in web dev for 6 years, so I was able to stop reading after Chapter 5. Perhaps this book may be construed as too shallow for the experienced developer. Or, perhaps there really isn't much more to say about XHTML to justify a thicker book. I won't know personally until I read at least one other book on the subject.

If you are new to XHTML -- as well as XML technology in general -- this book is great way to learn about the related technologies quickly.

I got this as I felt that XHTML was going to help me in my job.

Now I'm hoping the knowledge I've found in this book will help me
GET a job.

It's a good way to help an HTML designer make the transition to XHTML, but a good XML reference may be in order!

You do need some knowledge of HTML(at least know how to do a CSS!)

This book has good explanations. If you are planning to migrate from HTML to XHTML this is a good choice. Other than migrating, this book offers great working examples in the provided CD. The book covers CSS with XHTML, Intoduction to XML technologies like XForms, Xlink, and XSL. So get this book to be ready for the future. Note : Some chapters are hard to understand. You might have to read again to understand it correctly.

What is XHTML? Is it just another trendy acronym for web developers to toss around? Is it the child of a marriage between Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Extensible Markup Language (XML)? Is it worth worrying about?

The authors of XHTML have chosen to answer in a variety of ways. This book takes several approaches to explaining XHTML. They range from a high-level view of "Where did XHTML come from?" to an attribute-by-attribute listing of valid XHTML syntax to an in-depth look at Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). There are also several chapters of "What's next?" topics, each touching on an aspect of internet development (multimedia, forms, graphics, and scripts).

So what is XHTML? It is the Extensible Hypertext Markup Language. It's brings order to chaotic world of HTML by forcing adherence to XML standards. It promises to separate presentation from information (data). It can force a web page to act like data, with the benefit that anything that can access data can use your web page (like text-to-speech devices, mobile devices, and more). It's a W3C standard that has progressed beyond the 1.0 specification referred to in this book (and this book was published in 2001!).

This book could have easily been called XHTML and CSS - because they devote many pages to the key role that CSS will play in the deployment of XHTML. CSS is the way that the presentation elements are extracted from the HTML document - leaving only the data behind.

The book mostly succeeds in bringing XHTML to a wide audience. It tries to be an introduction, migration guide, and language reference. I recommend it to anyone interested in taking their internet development to the next level.

Know your goals. If you expect to have mastered XHTML after this book, look elsewhere. As said by another reviewer all the details are not covered and one is referred to other sources, but it is a good place for beginners to start. You will have to visit online tutorials to complete this book and you'll still need to purchase a XHTML book that can be used as a reference.

The author's expertise provides one with an excellent historical section, but I personally found it to be more on the side of information overload.

XML related subjects are mentioned, but only seasoned HTML'ers will be able to comprehend the explanations, which I found too brief to really be enriching.

For those with some HTML experience there are better books out there and one should continue their search for another XHTML book. Beginners will be will served with this book.

I love this book, they are no longer printing this book, but if you can grab it, grab it! It's truly amazing. Love this book and it comes with a CD.

I suppose this book might be helpful as a reference, but to someone who is actually trying to figure out what to do with xslt and xpath, this book is a very poor primer. I found that, in addition to offering little explanation as to how xpath and xslt are needed in a larger context (is this supposed to supplant sql??, for example), the examples are so error-prone that I learned more by correcting the errors than I did reading the book. Here is a list of errors you will encounter (from the CD) for the first 3 chapters:

1.1 (string not quoted)
1.2 (only 1 top-level element allowed).
2.1 (invalid character)
2.4 (cannot locate resource)
2.5 (template.xml undeclared namespace)
2.7 (cannot locate resource)
3.2 (output.xml invalid at the top level)
3.3 ditto
3.4 worked -- hey, a working example!
3.5 (output.xml invalid at the top level)
3.6 misplaced period
3.7 invalid at top level
3.8 only 1 top level element allowed
3.9 invalid at the top level...

The rest of the chapter examples are similar to this one.
Without good examples, a programming book is almost worthless.

I've had this book on my shelf since publication. I had to dig it out last week to do some fairly complex XSLT programming. The book was a huge help and helped me get everything done quite quickly.

I use this book as a reference book, not a how-to. This book is great for things like "what is the function that does 'x' and what are its arguments?" It probably helps that I know XML pretty deeply, so I don't typically look at the examples. Of course, that might be because the docs on the functions in the book are so good that I find I don't need to look at the examples.

XSLT hasn't changed much since this book was published. If you deal with XSLT, and, by extension, XPATH, get this book for reference.

I would agree this is more of a reference for the seasoned XPath/XSLT programmer. I'm a intermediate java programmer with some decent background in xml. I haven't really been able to get that much from this book in the way of examples. It's very light on examples.

This feels like a book that had it's table of contents laid out, and then the content filled in as quickly as possible. Editing must have lasted about 3 days. With a more thorough editing process, and a bit more thought to the examples (the boulevard examples taumatized me so much, I nearly stopped driving), it may have been a very good book.

In some sections, the same paragraph is repeated verbatim 2 or even 3 times. Often in the chapter overview, and then on the next page in the first chapter section.

Possibly the book appeals to other learning styles better, but I've found it a tough slog. In fairness though, XSLT is a strange and difficult beast- I may be transferring some of my frustration on to the messenger!

However, in general, I find the examples are too repetive, causing them to blur together. And you find myself flipping back as many as 6 pages at times to find the xml code the description is talking about.

And there is a lack of technical illustrations to help with more difficult topics.

I would have appreciate larger examples from different domains to specific goals. The problem with a lot of the examples is the purposelessness of the examples.

XML in a Nutshell, and Michael Kay's XLST reference have provided me much more joy.

My last word of advice- follow the examples live. XSLT and XPath need practice, and lots of it.

You couldn't ask for better service and a product in better shape. Thanks for your service.

I started with a book called Java 2 from Scratch and did a lot of scratching of my head. I think it'll be a good book for me eventually, but not right now. I needed something better to get my feet wet. A co-worker lent me his copy of Coulthard and Farr's book and I spent an evening with it. Afterwards I went to Amazon and ordered it.

If you are an RPG programmer (I'm from the ILE RPG IV side) and want to begin learning JAVA, this is the book to start with. It does a good job contrasting RPG with JAVA to as to give a decent reference point. No other book does that and I found it to be most helpful. When I finished the book, I felt a lot better about the language but I need to go further with something else (Ivor Horton's book is probably going to be the something else).

I thought the chapter on the Java Onion was really well done and very informative. The chapter on Threads was completly over my head. I'll return to that topic at some future point. The OO chapter was good but I found Jennifer Hamilton's Object Orientation for the AS/400 Programmer does a better job explaining these concepts. Over all these guys did a real fine job.

By the way, I had the privelege of attending their Java seminar at the Fall Common conference in Baltimore and they really made the seminar enjoyable. You should catch one of there presentations some time. They're a good team and keep your attention. They do a good job.

The one beef I have is they left me hanging on page 418 with the MsgBox class. They say it would be simple to add the line of code to your program to use the class. Maybe I'm being stupid, but it wasn't simple for me. They should have at least shown you how to use it because I still haven't figured it out. Phil or George, are you reading this? Maybe someone can e-mail be and let me know. Aside from that irritation, I really liked the book and would recommmend it to any RPG programmer looking to start learning JAVA. A word of caution, it's not the end all. It's a start but you will defintely need to move to something meatier as a next step.

This is a pretty good book for RPGIV programmers wanting to migrate to Java. It compares all the functions of Java to RPGIV in a way that is very understanding to non-object-oriented programmers. It's a much better book than the past Java books i've read (which are intended for university students familiar with C++).

What this book does lack however are self-excercises. It's merely a good reference book to learning the basics of Java. The authors do a good job of explaining the necessary components. This book also lacks a lot of 'interactive programming' samples other books offer. There were hardly any 'GUI' programming to practice on your home PC...mostly command line tests they show you. It's not a bad book overall.

Many readers coming to this might like what is described about java. Very different from RPG. The biggest change is the intrinsic object oriented nature of java. If you use RPG 3, then this will certainly be the most distinctive part of the narrative. RPG 4 programmers will at least be familiar.

There are many neat features about java that you should note. Like the higher level data structures, Vector, HashSet, Hashtable etc. These have been thoroughly debugged, and can save you much time recoding. Another difference is a full widget system. RPG came of age when graphics meant character oriented tables. Speaking of characters, java comes with internationalisation. Whereas RPG shows its heritage from an ascii background.

Unsurprisingly, the book has an extensive section on connecting java to a database. Some readers will perk up at this. You can closely compare functionality with RPG. Here, the latter is probably still stronger. But the java designers at Sun have done a competent job with JDBC.

If you have RPG III or RPG/400 code or this same code that was converted to RPG IV, then this book gives you little to go on but an education in ILE programming techniques. I think that if you were a C or Java programmer trying to understand RPG IV, this book would probably be very helpful.

My impression is that RPG IV should have been called RPG-C. That would have been closer to what it seems it was intended for, RPG to attract C programmers. I think that if one had their applications designed and written in ILE RPG with service programs and proceedures, etc. then this book would be helpful in learning the java language.

If your programs are designed around RPG III, converted or not to RPG IV, plan on having to learn two languages as you attempt to understand Java.

This book 'talks' about VRML. However, it has very limited scope with regard to "real world" applications and it contains almost no code examples. Almost completely useless for programmers.

I have read parts of this book and from not knowing what VRML is all about, I now have a clear idea of what its uses will be and how it will help companies market their products on the internet. A very good read.

John Vacca's new edition of VRML Clearly Explained covers the full scope of VRML 2 and its applications in the realms of VR, Telemedicine, Combat training and simulation, Communication, Data visulization, Art and entertainment are all addresed. A well written book on an important topic.

A lot of money for a book on the back ground of VRML and 3D in general. Doesn't really cover programming in VRML, not even the basics. Only chapter I could find was on VRMLSCRIPT which looks okay but I use JavaScript. Most of the referances are outdated or not available anymore and the CDROM has very little content, mostly URL links to deleted sites. The only programming chapter uses a 3rd party front end language tool which can export to VRML, alas this isn't on the CDROM and is no longer available at the URL. About 60-80% of the book is about what you can use VRML and 3D on the web for, I have an imagination so I can figure most of that out. I guess it's back to the dozen or so downloaded refs that I already have, I really wanted a book I could site down with and get a better understanding of some of the concepts and programming techniques in VRML, this isn't it. (If I had been able to find it in a bookstore to look at first it would have been left there.)

We manufacture VR Systems and we must costantly keep ourselves abrest of what happens in all secors related to our field. All of our SW developers have avidly read the book and preize it as a valuable work tool. I must say that all books written by John Vacca are clear, straight to the point, well documented and can easily turn into reference material for professionals as well as non specialist that want to know about the subjects John Vacca decides to write about

Use this book once you have Pence's basic HTML book down. It will provide many new tools to spruce up your exist web programming.

It is a great hands on textbook. The author did a great job conveying concepts. Easy to understand especially talking about codes. However a lot of typing error and project data or instructional errors. Misspelled in a lot of places. Information inconsistency. Requires professional editing services. I think the author should continue to write these book. Pence is a good writer but need to make sure information, data or examples are consistent. It hinders the student when trying to do the projects.

This book teaches what it claims to teach. It teaches CSS 1 for everyday tasks you would perform. It also teaches you how to create entire layouts using CSS. I strongly recommend this book to those who have just learned HTML and want to go ahead. This book also gives overview of very basics of CSS 2.

The book is well structured and includes hints, tips and other similar helpful stuff along the way.

Of course reading a book does not really make you a master unless you think and work hard yourself as well. So if you know HTML then this shud be your next step.

This book covers basic CSS. It succeeds in offering a very gentle and fairly comprehensive overview of CSS1 features, with some CSS2. However, his constant warning about the lack of robust support for CSS in browsers is somewhat dated and tiring. The book is also full of annoying typos that at times prevent examples from working--a missing period here, a misplaced semi-colon there. Perhaps to make the chapters (called "Modules" here) independent, there is quite a bit of repetition of the same ideas in many chapters. The gradual introduction of CSS syntax and techniques also seems to incourage the author to use examples that mix CSS and traditional html in ways that are not good CSS practice, just apparantely oversimplified examples to make simple points about transitioning from HTML to specific CSS features. That distinction could be lost on a lot beginners who don't get a more solid understanding of how to use CSS to build more complete and consistent pages and websites. I therefore wish the author would have included more comprehensive examples, rather than lots of smaller out-of-context and disconnected ones. This book is not terrible. I just think you could probably do better now. I would give it 2 1/2 stars if I could.

I swear the author of this book goes out of his way to make its readers feel incompetent. While full of useful information, this book is also just as full of typos and inconsistancies.

Do you want to know how frustrating it is to try and re-create a page using the code given to you in a book, have the page come out looking nothing like the example in said book, then finding out the reason for the discrepency is because the author actually coded their example differently? Well there's plenty of opportunities in this book!

I now have to learn inline CSS which I believe might have been covered to some extent in this book. I can't remember. That's how badly I want to forget this book! I'm sticking with CSS for Dummies!

I'm an ASP developer with just over a year's experience. This is the first book I've read on XML, and if I have a question, it will be the first place I look.

This book has it all, except solid examples that tie it all together. I now understand how vast and capable XML is, but I haven't gained an ability to put it to any real practical use.

Items I don't agree with:
1. The book is not 500 pages ...Page 223 marks the start of Appendix A, the XML 1.0 specification. The index ends on page 345. 122 pages of reference (over 33%).
2. The book's cover states I will learn to build web applications fast. Huh? There are no sample applications, only examples of how to use the syntax being discussed.
3. The cover states that I will learn by doing, as I work on a fictional e-commerce site. Huh? There are no exercises, and there is no e-commerce site being built.
4. The cover refers to real-scenarios. Again, where are they?
5. A chapter titled, "Common Examples of XML", was really an introduction to SMIL, SVG, and WDDX. Good stuff, but not what I was expecting.

This book needs a companion to deliver all that's been promised. I still don't have a clear picture of the XML DOM, the difference between a node and an element, nor do I have an idea of where I should be using XML (instead of (or with) the technologies I'm already familiar with (i.e. ASP, ADO, and JavaScript)).

Considering how the other reviews have labeled this book #1, is there any hope? Can anyone recommend a book that's better at painting the big picture?

The book starts out nicely explaining everything and it gets you motivated. From chapter 3 onwards, 19 pages later, its all guess work. He gives pieces of information with no coherent example that shows how all these pieces fit together. Its left up to your imagination to guess how it all comes together. Once more, I had to go back to internet tutorials (which I have found to be way better than a lot of computer programming books). XML is not rocket science. If you can't write a descent book about it, you ought to think about quiting the writing profession (stick to writing code). This was a waste of my time and money; needless to say a waste of paper and ink too.

This book is a really good basic book to get started. I've enjoyed it.

Just skip all the others and buy this one. Really.

Could have been good or even great. It starts clear, correct, and well-structured. Then about a third of the way through the book (which is really half the content because the last third is an absolete printing of the XML spec) the writing gets lazy. Comprehending the material becomes an absolute chore as all structure is lost.

The first part is the best intro to XML that I've read, but it's just an intro.

This is an excellent textbook for a beginning web design course. The hands-on exercises encourage active learning. The Student Files provide solutions to these so that students can self-assess their progress. There are four case studies that continue throughout the book that provide opportunities for students to apply their newly-learned concepts and skills. What really sold me on this textbook is the way it integrates XHTML, CSS, AND accessibility!

WASTE OF TIME
This book is a complete waste of time and it will sap your joy. You will learn far more with almost any other book. It is poorly written, the editing is non-existent, the educational constructs are poorly formed, the B.S. content is over the top, and the typos are serious enough to sabotage your web pages. In fact, the educational tone seems designed to sabotage your understanding of what you already know. Most of the details in the book are common sense and yet presented as ultra-orthodox truths from antiquity, as when the author refers to 10 years ago as "the last century."

LACK OF INFORMATION
The presentation of information is difficult to follow because the pages are clouded with stylistic jargon ripped-off from other publishing companies which have maintained a fine reputation for educational success because they know how to educate. To see successful authoring, go to any book store and see how many books there are in the following series: DUMMIES, IDIOTS, VISUAL, MADE SIMPLE, VISUAL QUICKSTART, or MICROSOFT PRESS. These series are designed to educate, empower, and inform. This book is designed to obfuscate.

STYLE OVER SUBSTANCE
For instance, take a look at the cover of this text book (as posted here on Amazon) and you will see a paint roller. This is the author's special icon to let you know you are still reading the same book. Section after section you see a paint roller, to open a section and to close a section. Apparently Web Design is colorful. Other icons, such as FAQ's are just "cute" but useless, because they are not FAQ's but just page decorations. Font decoration is random, extra spacing is random, and highlighting is random.

SUGGESTIONS
What the book needs is a table of contents that is useful, and a glossary so the book can be used as you read it. The index is skimpy (the most important part of the book) and each preview section and review section is non-usable. If you read as much as I do, I know that you have a method for learning, and for most people that method involves: Preview, Skim, Read, Review, and then use the book as a reference. This book does not have previews (more like hopeful affirmations) does not have reviews (except to tell you you're done with the chapter, ABSOLUTELY DOES NOT encourage skimming (the pages are meaningless jumbles of jargon) and the reading sections, when available, are short, and punctuated by meaningless faux-FAQs, comprehension-testers, points to ponder, and other monotony breakers, instead of real information. There is no way to review later because the book withheld active, authentic learning in the first place. You cannot even save this book as a reference because the tables are incomplete and incoherent, and the appendixes are poorly organized.

SUCCESSFUL OPTIONS
If you are required to use this book as a text-book for a class, just drop the class. You are smarter than that. Google the words "web design" and you will get all of this information for free! You don't need THIS book, just get a good book. The problem is, if your instructor requires THIS book then you will spend all of your time doing examples and not learning XHTML and CSS.

YOU CAN DO IT!
If you don't have other time-demands in your life then this book can walk you step-by-step through some ideas about web programming, but it will treat you like a Junior High School student. If you ARE a Junior High School student then you are WAY TOO SMART for this book. This is a text-book written for Junior College students who want to get a job, and their school is designed to make it hard to graduate. This book will not prepare them for a job. It only weeds out the students who don't have the guts to finish the course. If you want to be weeded out you won't make it as a programmer. If you want to be a programmer you won't put up with this book. If you really want to learn for fun, then get one of the other books listed above. Don't even buy this one for $.01 plus shipping. There's nothing in it worth looking at.

EDUCATION
My Bio and Bias: I am a doctor who teaches medical school, I have been programming computers for over 35 years, I am a life-long learner, I am a professional teacher, and my students would not put up with this book, nor would they put up with me if I required this book. My students, my peers, my friends, and most importantly, you...do not deserve this kind of condescension.

I highly recommend this book to newbie web designers/developers! The book introduces XHTML and CSS, web standards, web accessibility and web design best practices. The book's website at webdevfoundations.net contains related links, additional/new information, and chapter updates. The author did a great job starting me out with a basic foundation in web design concepts and skills I'm continuing to use!

Basically, if you're going to buy a tech book, 95% of the time, just go find the O'Reilly book and you're set - you'll learn, you keep it on the shelf as a reference, and you'll use it until, most likely, the subject dies off (although my Pocket Perl guides still get daily use.) What does that have to do with this book, you ask? Forced to buy it for a class so that a lazy instructor could use it for lessons and not have to put together course material, this thing is slow, poorly written, full of mistakes (and on the fourth edition no less!) and once I'm done with the class, will be worthless - if I can't sell it for probably 20% of the outrageous price it was new, I guess I'll start a fire next winter with it, because it provides almost nothing that would make you want to keep it as a reference at all. It's really just a class outline with study sections, homework and assignments for students, for instructors who are too lazy to want to actually put effort into teaching a class. Really, even if it was $10 is wouldn't be worth reading, but at the price, it's just yet another sad example of "academic publishing" where you pay a high price for a book that you should only buy if forced for for school (as I have) and then hope, nay... pray, that you may be able to get at least a tenner or Jackson back, if you're lucky, because it's mostly worthless as a textbook, and when the class is done, it's not even worth the paper wasted to print it. Avoid unless you've no other choice... or if you have absolutely not the slightest clue about the subject and want to buy a book that will make you feel like an expert when you're done - until you try to get a job or use what you're "learned" and Reality slaps you down hard and you realize this doesn't even begin to plumb the depths of a very deep, hard-to-grasp and rapidly changing subject. The author should be embarrassed.

Great book! It was easy to learn to design web pages with XHTML and CSS with all the hand-on examples and practice exercises in this book. This college textbook presents XHTML, CSS and web accessibility techniques, explores web design best practices, and even includes web promotion techniques for web designers! The companion website has links to useful websites and updates to the chapter. I highly recommend this book for web design or web development courses.

For me the best part of this book was Appendix A, entitled "XML Language Basics". This should have been the first chapter in the book. But by the time I got to it, I was pretty fed up with reading about "emergent behavior" and other buzz phrases. I did get a bit of a sense of what various acronyms mean, such as SOAP, UDDI, WSDL, J2EE and so on, but the ratio of fluff to substance was too high for my taste.

There are about 230 pages of actual content that provide a high-level tour of what the author calls the "data revolution." There is a crisp and concise overview of the XML technology family, along with some examples of XML in use. There is broad yet concise description of SOAP and Web Services. Common implementations like .Net, J2EE and other vendor implementations are discussed along with some of the issues in the industry. XML Security is discussed in enough detail to give you a good grasp of the issues. The book wraps up with some ideas about where this technology could take us.

The best thing about this book is that it shows how XML and Web Services overcome many of the problems that plagued RPCs, DCOM, CORBA and RMI in a way understandable by anyone.

This book is a quick read, in the concise, bulleted, margin-annotated style of Object-oriented Technology: A Manager's Guide. There are lots of really excellent visuals. This book will not help you actually write code or implement Web Services -- it is good for a semi-technical reader, or a technical reader who wants a better grasp of the big picture. Highly recommended.

If one can't manage to complete a book in a week, then it is not a book. It is a reference that you occasionally use. XML, Web Services, and the Data Revolution by Frank P. Coyle definitely comes under my 'book' category. If one wants to learn what XML and Web Services are in a week, this is a book to read.

Lot of information yet concise presentation accomplished with self explanatory pictures depicting various XML technologies.

I bought this book based on the reviews and I made a mistake.
This book doesn't give the technical details I wanted.
If you are one of those bosses who doesn't get into details and just want to know the jargon so you can look technical when you are in meetings with more incompetent people, this is your book.

Mr. Coyle has done an excellent job in demystiying XML and Web Services. He describes the technical details in a fashion that makes it easy to understand, and comprehend on the first read. His visual examples help the reader see the network, and communication paths that takes place between XML, SOAP, and WSDL. I consider myself semi-technical, and I felt that I had a much better grasp of these concepts, and the possibilities of applying this technology after reading his book. Highly recommended.

I have had NO previous experience in IT whatsoever. The book was very simple written, step by step.
I learned the basics of XHTML very quickly. Now, I am experienced web page builder and don't write codes anymore (I use web page building Applications), but believe me, I open that book almost everyday to refresh my memory.

I have had NO previous experience in IT whatsoever. The book was very simple written, step by step.
I learned the basics of XHTML very quickly. Now, I am experienced web page builder and don't write codes anymore (I use web page building Applications), but believe me, I open that book almost everyday to refresh my memory.

There is a very good 150 page book in here waiting to get out of this bloated expensive tome. Unfortunately, the endless padding just makes information retrieval extremely slow. Not content to show us bits of code to illustrate particular points, Holzner gives us complete pages of irrelevent mark-up almost every time. Rather than using a tabular approach to show what elements can be used with each tag, the author dribbles through the entire descriptive list in every chapter. The cardinal sin, though, is Holzners repeated use of depricated elements and tags in his illustrations. Surely a book on XHTML should show the XHTML way of doing things rather than harking back to earlier standards. Yes, I know the tags still work in most cases, but they won't for much longer and there is ALWAYS an alternative approved XHTML way of doing things. The book is also very poorly designed: symbols for the various browsers and W3C standards would have made things much clearer. A huge disappointment.

I liked the immediate solutions menu at the beginning of each chapter that list the most likely sought problems and the pages where you can find the answers. Also, the chapters on JavaScript were informative.

On the down side, why would anyone write an XHTML book w/ out concentration on cross-browser functionality? Many of the examples were solutions for just IE or for just Netscape. The whole point of validated XHTML is to reach the widest possible audience which means coding to a defined standard; browser specific code is mostly pointless. Also, as someone mentioned, the use of deprecated tags in examples caused me to be wary of the code throughout the whole book. Finally, why wait till page 503 to cover CSS? That should have been demonstrated early on to discourage the use of inline formatting within pages. And the CSS coverage, a chapter crucial to web development (ie, separation of data and presentation), was weak.

I guess for someone starting out it's ok to use this as a guide. But I urge anyone reading this book to avoid the use of deprecated tags or your web pages will render different ways in difft browsers.

After browsing through this book, I quickly went back and started reading it from the beginning. This is a great book for beginners in web authoring and an excellent ref. for experienced authors. As a self taught web author, I have purchased and read many books. For those just beginning, this book is worth the price. As for advanced authors, this book is a valuable ref. which includes the the newer XHTML 1.1 .. check this out. You will not be regret it. Well structured and complete and easy to read and understand. You will comprehend all that you read.

I started my search for an HTML+CSS book on Amazon, thinking that the highest-rated books would be a sure bet. I'm glad I browsed at the bookstore before buying, since otherwise I would have missed this gem of a book.

It was a good fit for me. The writing is concise, thoughtful, and light-hearted with an under-stated humor that makes you think how nice it would be to sit down and have a chat with the author.

The order of the presentation is very logical, and the integrated teaching of a little XHTML with the CSS to go along with it in every chapter was exactly what I wanted. I had a sense of orderly, steady progress while reading along and doing the exercises, moving from one "baby step" (my word choice) to the next.

What this book teaches, you will learn well. It gives as much depth and coverage of HTML and CSS as I think a single-volume primer should: not too little and not too much. I don't feel intimidated now at all, to pick up Eric Meyer's CSS books or to read through the HTML of popular web pages, to see how they tick.

Sure, there are errata--those are corrected on the author's website. I also wasn't thrilled with Sybex's typesetting and choice of inserts at the front of the book. There are quibbles to be found once or twice in every chapter, but overall this book seems to be a product of experience and careful attention to the presentation.

This book isn't as flashy as some, but it's solid, acceptably up-to-date, and worthy of your time. I recommend it especially for beginners who tend to procrastinate when seeing large tomes and who want to start small but have big ambitions... like me!

After learning HTML a few years ago I decided to write my new website using CSS. This book was to be my introduction to CSS, and I am sorry I spent my money on it. Learning should be fun, and this book is not. It has good information, but such poor layout and so many errors in it I hardly know where to begin. When I'm learning something new and an exercise doesn't turn out right, it's natural for me to assume I've made a mistake. After literally hours of fighting with the code, I find out it's because of a typo in the book!

For example, in chapter 7, learning how to make links, I couldn't get the links from the "blue" page to link to the "yellow" and "green" pages. I followed her instructions to the letter, reading the same paragraphs over and over. Then, after a frustrating hour, I tried experimenting with other things. Turns out, I needed a "./" before the path to the linked file. The book said to use "../" . One "dot" off, and it nearly drove me crazy! Now, this solution isn't consistent with the code for links on the "index.html" page, and they "should" be the same, but they aren't, and I'm more confused than ever.

If this was the only error, I'd not complain, but the book is simply riddled with sloppiness in the details. The book contains a CD for the reader to use to duplicate the exercises in the book. In chapters 4 and 5, the book uses a page about a bridge to teach formatting, inserting images, etc. The book shows page screenshots where the filler text is in English. The pages from the CD sometimes show the filler text in Latin. The author tells the reader where to insert a bit of code in the English text, but the reader working with the page from the CD is left to figure out where in the Latin text is the same place to insert the code. These are just two errors, and there are so many more.

The book uses small fonts and has a lack of whitespace. There are a lot of tips and notes that, while useful to know, interrupt the instructions and break my train of thought. The screenshots are not aligned well with the text. It would have been helpful to actually have arrows pointing to the parts of the screenshot that the code pertains to, but that's not possible because the screenshots on the pages often pertain to text on other pages.

I recently saw "More Eric Meyers on CSS" and was struck by its' beautiful user-friendly layout. It makes learning almost effortless. It made me regret my purchase of this book.

I know that this is written by someone very knowledgeable (at least for HTML and related web technology) right from the beginning when I read the first chapter. I learned HTML 8 years ago and didn't keep up with the latest version for a while; I read about CSS on the web, but never felt like mastering it, until I read this book. She is good in pointing out all the interesting details.

I definitely recommend this book strongly.

Virginia really teaches those of us who were weaned on tables how to approach the way of thinking about CSS based design. An excellent reference, I look at this every day. If it weren't for Virginia's clear thought process and method of thinking, I doubt that my web design business would be anywhere near keeping up with the times.

This is a good book, but I don't think it was proofread. There are numerous gramatical errors that are annoying. More than I have ever seen in a technical book.