HTML and CSS: Design and Build Websites First Edition

When I first mentioned to a computer scientist friend that I bought a book to learn HTML, his response was "why would you use a book?" The fact of the matter is that while the material of any non-fiction piece can be found via the internet, the knowledge of HTML is particularly accessible; as of my writing this a Google search of "HTML tutorial" generated over 300 million hits. With websites devoted to the subject like w3schools.com and htmldog.com why should you buy a book? This is the most general question to answer.The benefit of this book is that it is very well written, organized, and easy to follow; this is where a book can do better than the internet. That begin said, this book is truly for beginners - it assumes you know nothing about HTML or mark-up language structure. The book is divided into two halves: one html (structure) and the other CSS (formatting). The first chapter is devoted to basic text pages. Then the following chapters describe the basic elements of which most web pages are composed: lists, links, images, and tables. The second half covers how to make these elements pretty. There are two major benefits from this book in terms of content. First, there are many little external references that can help you find what you need; for example, [...] is listed as one way to crop pictures (granted I usually do this in iphoto). Secondly, while the text does not teach you everything, it gives you an idea what to Google to learn more. The text gives you a broad overview of the main topics and once you understand the buzzwords you can dig deeper.One aspect of website design is to make something look good. This book looks really good. All of the diagrams are extremely clear and ample whitespace is used to create a nice flow. At the beginning, Mr. Duckett outlines the color-coding he will use for each type of page (i.e. title, summary, etc..) to help guide the reader. The choices make the pages stand out even when the only feature of the page type is a background color. He also spends time in some of the chapters discussing artistic features such as contrast and why to use png versus jpg format for images. These additions add a useful aspect to a book that really could just be about coding. I also think style is extremely important to keep in mind when making a website.Overall I think this book is a good starting point if you want to make a website with little to no knowledge of coding languages. It is extremely well organized and clear. Furthermore, I used to as a starting point for my own website. However, I can see how someone would instead use the free resources available online. I have frequently consulted these myself for more detail.

I am a Masters student in Computer Science, so when I had to learn HTML and CSS in a hurry to help out a friend with her website, I wasn't looking forward to going through another dense programming textbook to pick up something that should be simple, visual, and fun. Luckily for me, I found this book. It's presented in an elegant, graphical format with sparing use of text- almost like a picture book. It's the perfect format for a book whose goal is to teach a language primarily used to present things visually- can't believe it took someone this long to figure out. It is clearly intended for people in creative fields like graphic design, who have little to no programming experience but could benefit from learning HTML and CSS. While it should really resonate with that demographic, it's also sufficiently deep to be a welcome addition to the bookshelf of seasoned developers.Despite how little text you have to pore through, this book covers a remarkable amount of material and in plenty of depth for most people. It's incredibly well planned-out and seems to offer and omit just the right information. The author also offers a lot of great background info on each topic which I think will be very helpful for most people. The writing is clear, concise, and not too dry. It made for an engaging and informative read-through, and has been serving as a fantastic reference ever since. Among other strengths of this book, the index is very well done and I find myself reaching for this book as a reference almost as often as Googling some question I have.While I think that this book is impressive overall and I'd recommend it even on the merits of how darn good it looks, I have a couple suggestions for the next version. First, the cover curled up almost instantly, which is kind of a bummer. Second, I think that given the (intentional) simplicity of the material, it would be useful to include a couple of pages at the end presenting some more advanced concepts people should be aware of (e.g. JavaScript/jQuery/AJAX, mobile design techniques, PHP, databases, etc.), and a brief explanation of each. I know this book is super entry-level, but almost anyone who's writing HTML will at some point run across these terms and might find them confusing.