Markup Languages Books

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.

Every master was once an apprentice; the beginner must start at the beginning. For the author of an introductory text on a technical subject, the challenge is to adopt the "beginner's mind," which is characterized in Zen practice as "is the mind that is innocent of preconceptions and expectations, judgments and prejudices." The teacher of novices must clear his mind and place himself in the mind of the student who knows little or nothing about a subject. He must be able to transmit complex concepts in clear, non-technical language and provide enough information to make the subject understandable, yet not overwhelm the student with too much information or information that is not pertinent.

The first two chapters of "Beginning HTML with CSS and XHTML: Modern Guide and Reference" satisfies the requirements of a beginner's book quite well. The language is clear, concise, and devoid of jargon. The remainder of the book is quite uneven, probably due to the publisher's decision to employ two authors for the book. Craig Cook (the author of chapters 1, 2, 4, 5, 8 and 11) is more than capable of communicating technical information using plain language. His prose is concise and accurate, yet he maintains a gentle, witty tone that is ideal for making the neophyte feel at ease with new material. David Schultz is much less adept at maintaining the `beginner's mind.' His prose is often convoluted and awkward, making it difficult to decipher the terms he attempts to explain.

Chapter 4 is an excellent overview of the basic structure of a semantically structured web document. For someone looking for an introduction to HTML and CSS fundamentals, the book is worth buying for this chapter alone. It would also serve a more experienced hand as a concise guide to the proper use of HTML elements.

Chapters 3, 6, and 7 all have a common weakness: the author fails to provide clear definitions and explanations for terms. An example, from p. 164: "charoff: Specifies in pixels or as a percentage how far the alignment should be adjusted to the first character to align on. This requires the use of the align attribute with the value set as char." Contrast this definition with one penned by Cook, p.211: "disabled='disabled': When present, disables the control so that it cannot receive focus and its value cannot be modified. Many browsers will display disabled controls a `grayed-out' state. The value of a disabled control is not submitted."

It appears that Mr. Cook devoted a considerable amount of thought to writing his definitions, while Mr. Schultz was content to restate the official specifications. Cook takes the time to carefully explain a term, giving examples of how it is used in the real world. His definitions & explanations indicate a deep and nuanced understanding of the subject material.

Chapter 10 presents an introduction to JavaScript. Appearing out of place in a book on beginning HTML and CSS, one chapter on JavaScript is simply inadequate to explain even the rudiments of this powerful (but often misused) tool. This space could have been better used in covering CSS positioning in more detail and providing more visual examples.

Chapter 11 is a solid walkthrough in putting together a basic website, from the design process through to final markup. This chapter pulls together what has been presented in the rest of the book and would certainly enable a beginner to create an attractive & functional website from scratch.

Finally, the book provides four appendices. The usefulness of these appendices varies widely. Appendix A is an XHTML 1.o Strict reference: it would be useful but for a complete lack of examples. Appendix B covers color names and hex values: does anyone actually use these? HTML colors are notoriously hideous and their use should be avoided. Appendix C covers special characters: this is a good reference to have. Appendix D covers CSS browser support: again, a useful reference.

But why is there no glossary? A glossary of terms is ESSENTIAL in a beginner's book. Please, leave out the scary HTML colors and give us a glossary!

Despite its shortcomings, "Beginning HTML with CSS and XHTML: Modern Guide and Reference" is a useful book for a person needing to understand the fundamental concepts and application of HTML and CSS. The publishers would have served their readers better by providing a consistent authorial voice throughout the book, including more thorough coverage of CSS positioning and layout, and providing more high-quality graphical examples. This book is a good bet for the beginner who wants to learn the fundamentals of HTML and CSS to create well-structured and usable websites.

Despite the "Beginning HTML" in the title, this small horror is a densely packed text of incomprehensible jargon.

This book is only useful for balancing wobbly table legs and for teaching writers how NOT to write a reference work / tutorial.

I bought it based on the title, not the contents. (It was shrink-wrapped at a brick-and-mortar bookstore) Had I seen a sample of the text, I would have reshelved it hurriedly or offered a dime to buy it for firewood.

As a reference work for web designers, or a tutorial for beginners, it ranks below any other book I've seen on the subject.

APPENDICES:
1) The promised CSS is scattered throughout the book, with no CSS reference guide in the appendices.
2) The appendices for HTML and XHTML describe each tag's parameters in such a way as to leave one wondering how to use them, and what each tag and parameter does.

EXAMPLES:
The authors clearly did not proofread the version that reached the printers, or the editors made unexpected, inexcusable last-minute cutbacks. This is most obvious in photo captions that ask us (unbelievably) to find the differently colored text in identical B&W screenshots (p. 143), and in examples of JPEG artifacts/compression (p. 108) and pixelating (p. 106) that are unnoticeable because the example photographs have been shrunken far too much or carelessly created.

INDEX:
Carelessly assembled, neglecting common terms like "mouseover".
LANGUAGE:
Professorial pointification and obfuscation rather than real advice to beginners or helpful reference for experts. Reads like a fillibuster performed by a student defending his masters' dissertation.
For example, what beginner could make use of this entry in the appendices?
(p. 353)
"The param element allows you to set run-time values for objects that have been inserted into a document. Required attributes: type: specifies the MIME type of the resource specified in the value attribute when the valuetype attribute is set to ref; value: specifies the actual value associated with the parameter"
...and so on.

Sentences are needlessly wordy, overly technical, and filled with passive verbs. In short, the writing bores and frustrates more than an afternoon spent with an enthusiastic life insurance salesman.

For example, from page 352: : "disabled": Sets the control as "disabled"; "value": Specifies the value for the option that will be sent to the server.
Why would anyone whose first language is English say "as" instead of "to"? What writer uses a word ("disabled") in the same word's definition? What "control" are the authors talking about? Why was ink so valuable that the authors couldn't give examples these options in use? What are the possible values for "value"?

Buy this book only if your goal is to frighten a web designer's boss away from learning what the designer does for a living....or if you need something slim yet heavy for flinging at life insurance salesmen.

Found this book to be a concise guide to learning html, css, and xhtml conforming to the latest standards. I had dabbled with web pages before, and though I could eventually hack something together, I knew it wasn't the way the pros did it. This book provided a good conceptual framework on how to separate presentation from content, the key reason to use CSS.

Beginning HTML with CSS and XHTML: Modern Guide and Reference by David Schultz and Craig Cook is an excellent beginners introduction to HTML and CSS. Through each of the eleven chapters the authors walk through the basics and foundation of HTML. For those who are just treading in the waters of HTML and CSS, this book will help you understand the tools available to you as you craft your markup. You will learn about the tags available, their available attributes and purposes, and how to finely tune these into a semantic layout that ultimately gives your content more meaning.

Chapter 1 is our quick history lesson and introduction to HTML. They give background and insight into the goals and purposes of HTML, and how these were shifted during the browser wars and the battle for browser dominance and market share. They introduce the different versions of HTML available, and what they mean for your markup and the rendering inside of the browser. As CSS is discussed, there is also a discussion on keeping a clean separation of content and presentation. Chapter 1 lets us see the big picture and evolution of HTML.

Chapter 2 builds the foundation for the rest of the chapters. This chapter discusses the basics of XHTML and CSS. The building blocks discussed here will be addressed in each and every subsequent chapter of the book. Things such as tags, elements, attributes, and formatting. We are also given a snapshot view of what comprises an XHTML document, the doctype, the HTML element, and the document tree. All of this plays into understanding the fundamentals of CSS, cascade, and inheritance. We now have our history lesson and basic constructs in place, it's time to take a look at the rest of the pieces to the puzzle.

Chapters 3 and 4 cover a large territory. From constructing a useable head section, to walking step by step through many of the available HTML elements available to you as you put your content together. With discussion of each element, you are given detailed instructions of how and when it should be used, with an exhaustive list of its available attributes. CSS is briefly discussed, but will be re-introduced in a later chapter after we have our content constructed.

Chapter 5 is all about images. This chapter gives a brief primer on how digital images work, and what are the formats you can use within your content. Images can serve different purposes: icons, decoration, background, or context. Each of these are discussed with information on how to place them accordingly with CSS or the img tag.

Chapter 6 is all about linking. You are introduced to the a tag, its available attributes, and how you can create different types of links. Textual links, anchor links, and linking an image are all discussed.

Chapter 7 is all about tables. Despite what you may hear from others, tables have a very good semantic use in regards to tabular data (who would have thought?). However, tables are also misunderstood in relation to the tags and attributes. It is important to build tables with accessibility in mind, and this chapter goes over some of the elements that haven't received as much exposure. These include, but are not limited to: caption, colgroup, and tbody. This chapter will give you the information necessary to build a powerful and semantically rich table.

Chapter 8 discusses all of the little details to building a usable and accessible form. Just as with tables, there are some elements that are often forgotten about when building forms. This chapter does a great job of covering all of the necessary components for a form, and how to structure them. Form elements are rendered with the underlying operating system, so the end of this chapter discusses CSS and some of the ways you can spruce up the look of your forms. This is to be used with caution, as forms are rendered differently in each browser.

Chapters 9 and 10 discuss the other 2 pieces of the trinity of the front end: CSS and JavaScript. These chapters are meant to be brief primers, and will most likely whet your appetite to learn more about each aspect. They are also placed here to give you a good foundation as the final chapter will roll everything up into a case study.

Chapter 11 is the end of the journey. What good would the book be if you couldn't put what you have learned into practice? This chapter creates the fictional Spaghetti & Cruft website (you have to read the book to find out the meaning of the name). This chapter starts with the design process, moves to the building process, and then polishes it off by adding enhancements with CSS and JavaScript. The humorous name aside, this chapter is one of the most valuable chapters of the entire book. This final chapter brings the book to a close, and with it leaves you a solid foundation as you continue your journey of building other sites.

Conclusion
Many would argue that they don't need to learn HTML, that is what a WYSIWYG is for. This book shows you the value of understanding the history, the basics, and the semantics of HTML. It is important to note that nothing found in this book is earth-shattering, however, if you are a beginner and new to HTML, this book will give you the proper start you need to begin developing right away. If you are moving away from the reliance of a WYSIWYG, you may be surprised at many of the elements available to you that are covered in this book.

I ordered this book along with Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML. I was worried based on reviews that this might be a little over my head. My only program experience is with VBA macro writing. I wanted Head First's book to protect myself from getting lost.

What I found is there was no problem understanding this well-presented and clear text. In fact, I much prefer it to the "dummy downed" Head First book. Had I to do it over, this would have been my only purchase.

Read this book and understand it unless you want to flounder around solving problems that these guys already thought through. The book is not a "how-to" guide, but rather a discussion of all the abstract concepts you need to master if you want to do things right. I found this book far more readable than some of the research these guys have published, and a very useful starting point for evaluating various products and technologies related to XML and web data.

I should have listened to "this textbook isn't for the ordinary Web developer", not "this book is a must for all people interested in XML!" The book is quite academic. It presents a formalism for describing semi-structured data and queries on those data, then illustrates how XML, XML-QL, XSL, etc can be understood in terms of that formalism. I am not sure who would find this useful -- perhaps the people who are working on new extensions to XML itself? Or a person who is designing parsers? Probably not a person who is just trying to use XML.

For the most part, this book covers the academic research on semistructured database management that started in the mid-90s (pre-dating the XML explosion - sometimes research is ahead of practice!). Such issues are not that interesting for folks who are doing bread-and-butter client-side XML development, and whose interest in "XML" and "databases" is limited to knowing how Oracle 8i implements its "XML out the top" package. However, the book is relevant to people who are already "in" the semistructured data management space - people who are thinking ahead to some of the potential directions that XML query languages might take, for example. The authors are prominent and well-respected in this area.

One of my main beefs with the book is that it does not really say anything about what XML databases might look like in practice. This is a tall and perhaps unfair order, since we don't yet have standards for XML schemas and query languages. But I have yet to see XML database proponents provide a clear and convincing explanation of why XML is going to be a way to structure stored data as well as a way of transmitting and reformatting data.

The book provides a wonderful link of the three concepts: Relation, Semistructured , and XML. The discussion is clear and concise. We know that Relation is well used in modelling enterprise data today, since the high performance of RDBMS . On the other hand, XML is well accepted the most suitable for business information representation. The author uniformed them under the banner of semistructured data model. The text drives the readers into the insight of the data world even though it is in the abstract level. Anyone can be benifitted by reading it if he want to go deep in the XML and data world.

Read this book and understand it unless you want to flounder around solving problems that these guys already thought through. The book is not a "how-to" guide, but rather a discussion of all the abstract concepts you need to master if you want to do things right. I found this book far more readable than some of the research these guys have published, and a very useful starting point for evaluating various products and technologies related to XML and web data.

I got this book, and was disappointed. It starts out teaching HTML, the language web pages are used for. HTML programming is the wrong way to start learning web page design. Tools like FrontPage and even MS Word will do ALL the HTML programming for you. After starting to read this book with my 8 year old daughter, we went down to the computer, started Microsoft Word, and made a couple web pages. That was a visual way to program, and it lets the tools handle the details. This book is the wrong way to learn web page development and design.

Dave's Quick 'n' Easy Web Pages: An Introductory Guide To Creating Web Sites is a simple, highly practical guide for web designers ranging from beginning to intermediate experience and skill. Individual chapters address hyperlinks, animated images, sound, tables, additional features like counters and message boards, and much more in this superb, "user friendly", compact primer that can teach anyone to get a basic web page up and running in almost no time at all!

Although this is listed as a "kid's" book, it is a clear step by step procedural manual for anyone new to HTML and wanting to set up their own website. Dave takes us from a simple text-filled page through adding numbered lists, bulleted lists, colors for text and background, adding tables, adding images, creating hyperlinks with text or images, and creating an image map (an image that has "hot spots" to be clicked as links). He also has listed many websites for downloading free programs, clip art, backgrounds, etc. He shows how to set up, save, and then upload website pages onto the Internet. The procedures are easy to follow if the reader carefully recreates what Dave has written.

Definitely a good book for anyone new to creating personal webpages.

Up until recently, web pages held a certain mystique for me. Not any more. One of the reasons for that is this little 116 page book.

Rather than load you up with a bunch of theory and technical jargon, Dave Lindsay gives you just what you need to get started. By the end of the first chapter (which is only nine pages), he has you creating your own basic web page. This all with the most basic of word processors (like Simpletext in MAC or Notepad for your PC)!

With information conveniently contained in the back of the book, he even shows you how to obtain software to upload this basic web page, a server to host your site, and how to upload your page -- all for free.

From there, the author guides you through more advanced techniques like adding sound, message banners and even animated images. This is really a lot more than I expected from a "basic" book, especially one that is just over 100 pages.

For web design "newbies" that just want to get their feet wet, this is a great place to start. It's all written in plain English with the bare minimum of technical codes. As you go through the book and each new technique, they are illustrated to demonstrate how it changes your site.

DAVE'S QUICK 'N' EASY is great for the person intimidated by technology or someone that just wants to dive right in, but doesn't know a lot about HTML (the language used to build web pages). For the complete novice or beginner, this book is like running a 100 meter dash. It gets you designing a web page in no time flat.

When I agreed(okay, well, volunteered)to recreate a section of my employer's website I was, perhaps, a bit too confident in my skills. I am by no means computer illiterate, but I had very little experience with HTML and all else that is needed to design a webpage.

I was to be working with a well known web development program and tried as best I could to learn through the tutorials and such. Ha. Let's just say that didn't work out so well. And this program is suppose to make things easy. One of those, "even idiots can use this because this and that are already done for you" type things. But I guess I like doing things the hard way.

And that's where *Dave's Quick 'n' Easy Web Pages* came in. It details in very simple terms HTML coding, showing you what the page would look like in code and also what it would look like in a browser. Things like hyperlinks and how to insert become far less daunting with the instructions in this book.

I don't think that it matters that it was written by a very young man or that the publisher has seen fit to classify it as a young adult text. I found it infinitely more useful and usable than a good deal of the other books I picked up for help.

The basics it has. It introduces you to the coding needed for a great start into designing SVG. A few header errors may frustrate in the beginnning, but with a little reading, they can be overcome.

If you'd like to get a grasp of what SVG is all about and how it works and you find the SVG standard (600+ pages) to be rough going then I would highly recommend this book as a starter. It provides a good introductory overview of SVG and then systematically illustrates, using lots of basic examples, how much (but certainly not all) of it works. I'd consider this to be more of an illustrative exercise book to help someone get a running start using SVG. The book certainly isn't comprehensive, SVG is WAY too big and complicated to be completely explained and illustrated in a single volume. Nor are the examples in the book particularly long or sophisticated - however, once you learn the basics you can quickly start writing your own SVG scripts (or better comprehend existing SVG code or code generating libraries). The main problem now is that the downloadable Adobe SVG plugin (Windows/Mac)is really the only mostly complete standard SVG viewer available so it may be a while before SVG really catches on (not to leave out the Apache Batik project!).

I was excited to find a book about SVG finally in print: the technology will clearly revolutionize the web. Unfortunately, this book is totally inadequate for all but the simplest introduction to SVG, perhaps as a guide to editing the output of graphics packages.

The code examples will make any programmer cringe, as the same extensive property settings are declared over and over again for related objects. This produces dozens of lines of unmaintainable code where 5 lines of JavaScript would suffice. In fact, there is practically no discussion of generating SVG programmatically using Perl or Javascript. Although there is a chapter on "interactive graphics", it basically covers menus and rollover effects. If you were hoping for something on data-driven graphics, look elsewhere, because this topic is strangely absent from the book.

Worse, external CSS style sheets are only introduced in a desultory way near the end of the book, after hundreds of pages of code examples with the same inline styles declared over and over again and applied to every object individually. The code examples would be many pages shorter, and far more readable and maintainable, had CSS been introduced early and used appropriately.

Finally, there is no reference section. If you are hoping to find (for example) a list of methods and properties for each object, DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK! There are too many shocking omissions to list. One example is that animatable transformations such as scaling are simply not discussed. The author gives an example of a series of animated rectangles, where the sizes are altered by changing the individual width and height attributes. Worse, if you look up "scale" in the index, you'll find an example of a graphical scale (think ruler) where each of the lines is an individual object defined by hand, presumably by cutting and pasting the line of text and changing the x offset!

Unfortunately, at present there is NO adequate book on SVG for programmers. This book, however, is unsuitable even for designers (its primary audience) because it encourages excruciating coding habits and ignores the tremendous possibilities for automating repetitive design tasks.

There is one thing I love about this book is that it shows you the code step by step, and you can see the variations of the results and tune-ups one sample to another. I would still expect a little bit more in-depth discussion of SVG given the fact that the author has some programming background. One thing I really wish the book would do is to indent some XML code properly. Not all the step-by-step guides have changes highlighted that instantly makes sense. For perfections and lazy people like me, downloadable sources or a CD-ROM will make it easier to explore the samples.

Remember the first time you used "View Source" in your browser to learn from someone who knew something you did not? Because you learned well and fast, you made a living from HTML. The Web grew so explosively partly because we were all learning that way.

Now imagine the same thing happening in Web graphics. A text-based graphics format, with source open for all to learn. SVG, as an application of XML, brings the potential of data-driven graphics to the Web. The graphic is the data and the data is the graphic, cutting out all middle layers.

This is not a book about pretty pictures, although it is well illustrated. It is code-centric and by necessity focuses on SVG tags and attributes.

The author expertly leads us in easy steps. The book is surprisingly easy to read. The author often changes tempo, removing us for a moment from the code and infusing a relaxed perspective, despite his obvious enthusiasm for this technology.

The author assumes a basic understanding of XML syntax and some knowledge of applied cascading style sheets (CSS). XLink and XPointer are covered only to the extent necessary for linking in SVG, for instance. CSS, designed for XML applications as much as for HTML, is used from the very beginning, displaying once again the ability of CSS to multiply the power and flexibility of any tagging system it is joined to.

The typography of the book, and the modest but effective use of color, contributes to the clarity of the exposition. The beginner should be aware that to follow along in the book, it is necessary to download freely available graphics tools and browser plug-ins almost 7 megabytes in total.

SVG is a graphics format unlike anything you have ever seen. It has not yet taken center stage in Web development -- but it will. Will you be ready or will you be playing catch up?

A better title would have been "HTML 4 A Self- Study Guide". The primary reson I chose this manual was for the online, interactive assistance. After trying the URL given in the book, and attempting to e-mail the publisher several times, without success, I finally used it as a self study guide. As such, it was adequate. If you're looking for a good tutorial, I'm sure you can find better, at a lower cost.

This book was good with some of the stuff in covered but offered little outside help. The CD is poor. It doesn't include the files you need and the trail offers it allows you to have are not the greatest and become hard to delete. All in all if your good at learning things by yourself you might enjoy this book.

I was very impressed with this book. I went through it and my attention was kept. There are good examples and even some humor. It was very thorough and I would recommend this for anyone who wants to learn HTML.

The Good: I started reading this book with virtually NO knowledge on HTML and it's related features. "HTML 4 Interactive Course" Gave me a complete view on the different material. It covers just about anything: VBScript,JavaScript,Perl,CGI-BIN, ASP,LiveWire, what else could you ASK for? After reading the Book, you'll know exactly what every one is talking about. However, you will still need to read a book on ASP, Perl and JavaScript, if you want to deal with scripts effeciently. The Bad: No Synchronization between the book and the CD, most of the time, you will find different sources in the text, and on the CD. Their Web Supports, could be much more improved, and their promised on-line mentor is probably sleeping. *Bottom line* - BUY this book to get the overall picture. You can master more specific issues later.

I purchased this book because of the continuing education units that I could get and because of the support features of the web-based learning offered by e-zone. You do not get any support from e-zone. There are many errors in the book and the CD was incomplete. They say there is an installation chapter in the book to guide you in setting up the software. There is no such chapter. The CD is missing files and you have to go to e-zone to get the fix, but it still doesn't include all the files that you need.

The book is good, but this is really a self-study book. You can't even e-mail e-zone and get a response from them.

This is...as others have stated... out of date, but still a good book. Those who want to know how to do html from scratch could still find useful information in here.

Good book.

Before Frontpage and before Dreamweaver I knew nothing about HTML. But I wanted to know super bad, and found this book by God graces. This book takes you step by step on how to write HTML the old school way, which can often still be the best way. Buy it, and you'll make yourself and others proud.

This book is really good. It has a lot of valuable information. The only thing about it is that it works 60% on frames and tables. If you already know a little, it's worth it, otherwise, I'd go a little more basic. It's overall really good though!

First off, I'm really rating this 4 1/2 stars (I've never rated anything 5 stars). This was the first book I bought on web design and have purchased 2 or 3 others since which were nowhere near as helpful. If you don't know anything, this is the book for you. If you know your code I'd still take a look through this one. It has some great tricks that you might not have thought of or can't quite get to work on your own. I still pull it out every now and then and I've been doing design for a living for 4 1/2 years. Bruce, keep up the great work! When's your follow up?

This book was published before HTML 3.0 was in wide use whereas all good HTML books today are written specifically for version 4.0. I should have looked at the publication date and compared it to competing titles. If this were 1996, I would have given the book four stars. I'm still not sure if I liked the book being printed in 'landscape' mode -- it reminds me of second grade.

Despite using terms like "hot tips" and "advanced techniques", this book is really a good introduction to HTML in general, covering Fonts, forms, graphics, frames and CGI programs. I found that it was explaining everything very clearly, using examples and illustrations where needed. The problem of course, is that HTML 4 features are missing, which means that there are a lot of neat tricks people are doing on web sites now for which I have to buy yet another book to understand.

Being an overly critical person, I have to mention some "minor" issues like the index being brain-dead (not having "" or "bold" for example) and the Author using tokens like '<' and '>' without explaining them.

Basically, this book USED TO BE good, but Morris should come out with a second edition that covers HTML 4. This book should really be pulled from circulation.