Frank Beckendorf said
Like O'Reilly's Missing Manual series, the Definitie Guide series is great. This title HTML & XHTML is no exception. And, the animals are cute...
If you want to make your pages stand out more, this is the title for you. But, it takes some reading. It's a big book with lots of information. Don't be scared off with this information. Lots of pages means lots of stuff to read and consider.
O'Reilly is a great source for computer related learning. Don't put the possibilities aside...Try them..
Robert J. Rieck said
A real educational experience. Also a well defined book. Be ready to learn when you read this book.
John Kenney said
I am new to HTML/XHTML and wanted a definitive reference book that told me about EVERY HTML tag - and exactly what were and weren't the correct ways to use them. After buying and reading about 5 other similar books, I finally got to this one and it is exactly right. All the other books cover useful snippets here and there, but they aren't exhaustive.
Note that this book isn't good for learning the basics. Rather, it is useful reference once you know the basics and need a source that tells you authoritatively that this such and such tag (e.g., 'p') does or doesn't support such and such attribute (e.g., 'padding') - fyi, it doesn't, except thru the 'style' attribute.
If that's what you need, then this is what you should buy.
Moondeer said
AMAZON, SHAME ON YOU!!!!! You should state what edition and the date copyrighted in the book information and indicate whether there are newer editions.
Watch out. Though Amazon has it covered by the "look inside", the book entitled only HTML is the 3rd edition of a book that is in it's sixth Edition. Amazon has combined all the reviews for all the editions. This should not be done!!!!!!! I have always felt comfortable buying from Amazon, no longer. I did have a seller (ordered through Amazon)send me this edition for the full price of the 6th. He got the sixth to me, but it took my time to get it corrected. The 3rd edition is probably not even worth the $10 for the used edition, but is certainly not worth the $20 for the new. Don't be fooled! I can't believe Amazon is stooping to this sort of a con. The most serious problem is that much of what you learn in this edition is being put out to pasture in the next 5 years.
There is a World Wide Consortium that is trying to standardize language and browswers. HTML is being replace in the interim with XHTML and eventually XML. A new, more powerful, formating language, CSS, Cascading Style Sheets, is replacing any formating in HTML.
Many of the reviews you see are for the 6th edition. It does have errors (it doesn't stick to the more stringent XHTML as it should, and the redundancy is annoying. Castro's is annoying in that she sectionalizes the code and it's not clear at first what she's doing. I haven't yet seen the others that are offered.
John Walzer said
Don't make the mistake of thinking this book will teach you how to code web pages using HTML and CSS. This is a reference manual that exhaustively discusses the mechanics of coding web pages, but it doesn't walk you through the process step by step. For that, I recommend O'Reilly's "Head First: HTML with CSS & XHTML." The benefit of this book is that it covers every aspect of HTML and CSS, including some which the W3 consortium has approved but no browser yet supports. It's best as a reference book for those already familiar with web page coding. It's full of surprises and "I didn't know I could do that!" moments, given its comprehensiveness.
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