Beere Wold said
First of all, I didn't just ordered this book blindly. I mean, I knew about its content, and how well written it were. Among many other books I could physically browse into and read, on the same subject, I found two books being outstanding, and this one being the best!
Here is how I went about about evaluating the content. As an engineer, I have got some expectations on how well done thing should be. I'm well-oriented on Networking, including HTML, and I needed some effort for my present project where HTML is part of the solution. I needed a comprehensive, structured and a content keeping some standard. This book offers the most in a very concise way.
I hope you don't need to have those "misty-engineer-eyes" to feel and get a similar perspective. And it's a book I definitely recommend for all kinds of reader regardless of background.
The reason that I ordered it from Amazon.com is the price. It costed half as much as it does at our local book-keeper here in Sweden, including shipping fee.
Y. Maman said
Where I'm coming from: I'm a backend developer who hasn't worked much with HTML and never got into front end design. I wanted to breach the barrier with a book that would provide me with what I needed to know to write semantically rich (x)html and style it without needing to become a guru.
This book does that and more.
The authors are professors but their tone is anything but dry. They're friendly but keep the content of each chapter rich with info, humor and advice on how to make use of it right away rather than wait to see some grand picture. The first half of the book introduces HTML but not as a grammar lesson. Rather it's always in the context of the kind of content you want to get out there and what the right tool (i.e.: tag) for the job is. The second half of the book explains how to style this content without any graphics intensive understanding. They show tableless one column and two column layouts and explain the various pitfalls beginners may have when attempting to set these up. There are also troubleshooting techniques explained (html and css validating, lurid palette to reveal what the divs in your document are actually doing...).
The book also lives up to the "standardista" claim. There are constant explanations of standards when it comes to using lists, tables (for tabular data), vs. 's, vs. @import and a host of other confusing road forks are covered in plain english with an eye toward the practical but standard compliant approach.
The companion site is excellent. Practically every example is shown there, so one can always look and compare to see that he or she is getting to where the authors want him to get.
I feel very enriched by the material and less nervous about tackling more advanced books on the subject of web design and web content.
F. Stepanski said
XHTML and CSS have been around for a long time, and there are lots and lots of books on the topic(s). But there are very few that explain these topics the proper way with regard to web standards and taking consideration to more advanced topics like SEO.
Whether you code your web pages from scratch or use a web design tool (Dreamweaver or Web Expression) or even use a CMS that creates most of the content for you. Understanding the presentation layer (XHTML) and what should and should not be used is important as you add on other layers (Structure and Behavior) with CSS, JavaScrpt and a server-side langauge.
The foundation of any website is XHTML and CSS and the author of this book really explains whats necessary with web design/
The author first starts off with what are web standards and how they have evolved over the years and with the most current web browsers. Then the basics of the different flavors of XHTML and DocTypes with the basic tag definitions...
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