Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML
by Elisabeth Freeman, Elisabeth Robson, Eric T Freeman
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Book Reviews of Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML
Book Review: Looking back - this was a good introduction
Summary: 4 Stars
When I first started putting together websites a few
years back this was the only book I read.
I think I made it about half-way through... I still
don't know how to write CSS and I haven't had to learn.
When I was using this book I used HTML-Kit - free HTML
editor that is pretty good. I learned enough hand-coding
to create fairly retarded websites that got my point
across and made me a lot of money.
Once I had made some money I bought XSite Pro and I don't
often hand-code HTML anymore, though I do go in and edit
stuff when I need to.
The WYSIWYG editors have come a long way in the last couple
of years. These days you can make a really nice looking
website with Wordress... with no HTML knowledge at all.
At the time I got this book it helped me with what I
wanted to do - make some simple sites. These days I would
just tell you to learn Wordpress if you just want
to create a site.
I write website saleletters and the WYSIWYG editors often
make messy HTML that doesn't behave well in all browsers -
most notably Mozilla and Internet Explorer. I find
it necessary sometimes to open the code of a letter an
pull out a lot of junk HTML. The foundation of my
understanding of how to do that is this book.
A worthwhile introduction - but you can make a site today
without it.
Book Review: Good for nearly all experience levels
Summary: 5 Stars
I know HTML and XML (I've designed a number of domain-specific XML vocabularies). The problem is my HTML knowledge was acquired in the dawn of the WWW when Mosaic was new technology and one could actually have a site announcing the dozen or so new sites appearing on the web each week. This was pre-CSS too. My skills needed some serious updating.
The first few chapters of the book are certainly elementary and I just skimmed them. But starting with chapter five I started getting new and useful information. Those first four chapters would be great for someone starting ab-initio. (I'll test them on my wife and kids.)
The rest of the book is good for fixing my bad-old HTML 1.0 habits and transitioning to strict XHTML. And by the end of the book I actually understood CSS, which had always been a black art to me.
I'm using my new-found knowledge to build some web sites using an XHTML template for Joomla and CSS for all the styling.
The treatment is light and fun, but not nearly as smarmy and condescending as, say, the XXX For Dummies series. It is kind of neat how they match the visual personalities of the make-believe actors with the questions and topics.
This is NOT a reference manual: you'll be very disappointed if you buy it for that purpose. Instead, read this book and keep it nearby when coding up your web sites; use an on-line XHTML or CSS reference when you need it.
Book Review: Excellent book for beginners - makes it fun and easy but is powerful knowledge
Summary: 5 Stars
This is an excellent book for beginners looking to understand the basics of HTML, XHTML and CSS. I deal with web designers quite a bit at my job, and have had a bit of experience creating or modifying sites using WYSIWYG editors, or doing small modifications on existing HTML. But really, I didn't know much aside from the Ch. 1 basics of any HTML course. And I didn't know any CSS, although I had heard the term quite a lot and understood what it was basically for. I certainly had no idea what XHTML was or why it mattered.
In just two weeks I feel like I have a firm grasp of the fundamental concepts of HTML and CSS. The book has a unique and fun style of teaching that gets mostly away from boring "lecture" style writing. I appreciated how the information was portrayed in various out-of-the-box ways. Yes, some things are kind of cheesy, but they DO work. For example, the "interviews" with various tags and elements seem like something out of a children's book. But they do work to reinforce concepts and they keep dry topics from getting boring.
I also surprisingly appreciated the crossword puzzles at the end of each chapter. Again, rather than assume you'll retain the information, something as simple a a cross-word puzzle forces you to search your memory, or seek out the info in the chapter, once again reinforcing the information.
Highly recommended for beginners.
Book Review: A Textbook That Is Not A Textbook
Summary: 5 Stars
'Head First HTML with CSS and XHTML' is the required text for my college class entitled: Creating Web Pages, HTML 1. When I received the book, I was pleasantly surprised that it was user-friendly. The book has an excellent and creative layout for each page; it is engaging and the information is current and easy to understand.
The authors have obviously spent a great deal of time putting this book together. This could have been a long, dull semester learning dry, computer tech material like links, attributes, encoding, W3C validation, design format, cascading style sheets, nesting, transitional vs. strict HTML, character entities and more. But this book has been interesting and makes me want to keep turning the page. Photos, colorful diagrams, and additional tools help to make the material relevant and enticing. I wish all textbooks were so well put together.
This book provides a solid foundation for learning web page design. From the first chapter, the authors have the reader designing a simple web page. The exercises in each chapter encourage a hands-on approach to learning, not just rote memorization. To be honest, I cannot imagine that there is a better book out there for the person beginning their training in the field of web page design. From beginner to advanced techniques, this book has it all.
Kudos to authors Elisabeth and Eric Freeman!
Book Review: Fantastic, thorough coverage of these topics - Extremely Well Done!!
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a WONDERFULLY done presentation! It is filled with graphics; it is filled with quick, simple, complete explanations in non-techie terms that allows a person to learn the techie terms well; it is loaded with repetition, repetition, repetition on all points (astonishingly, without overkill); there is exercise after exercise after exercise to give practical knowledge and everything is given in a form that doesn't skip a needed step or part (each datum or skill leads to the next, naturally and smoothly).
I think that in the whole book, the authors only used three words that might not be known by their audience - and one of those is later defined. The other two are easy to get definitions for, but could also be easily tossed into the not-needed-to-know-for-my-understanding-of-anything-else-in-this-section category (in other words, they don't enhance or degrade understanding of the material or are even needed).
The truly wonderful, outstanding thing about this presentation is that, about a third of the way through it, I got the idea that I would be a pro and be able to easily produce Web sites, professionally, if I wanted to. I'll bet that everyone who goes through this material will have the same idea, earlier than later. In my opinion, that is a sign of a GREAT presentation of material.
These folks delivered!! Simple as that!!