HTML, XHTML, and CSS, Sixth Edition

Other products by
(205 customer reviews)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
List Price : $34.99 Buy Low Price

Product Description
Need to learn HTML fast? This best-selling reference's visual format and step-by-step, task-based instructions will have you up and running with HTML in no time. In this completely updated edition of our best-selling guide to HTML, Web expert and best-selling author Elizabeth Castro uses crystal-clear instructions and friendly prose to introduce you to all of today's HTML and XHTML essentials. You’ll learn how to design, structure, and format your Web site. You'll create and use images, links, styles, lists, tables, frames, and forms, and you'll add sound and movies to your site. Finally, you will test and debug your site, and publish it to the Web. Along the way, you'll find extensive coverage of CSS techniques, current browsers (Opera, Safari, Firefox), creating pages for the mobile Web, and more.

Visual QuickStart Guide--the quick and easy way to learn!

• Easy visual approach uses pictures to guide you through HTML and show you what to do.
• Concise steps and explanations get you up and running in no time.
• Page for page, the best content and value around.
• Companion Web site at www.cookwood.com/html offers examples, a lively question-and-answer area, updates, and more.

Amazon.com Review
It's important for anyone who creates Web sites--even those who rely on powerful editors like Dreamweaver or GoLive--to know HTML. The World Wide Web Consortium rewrote HTML as a subset of XML (dubbing it "XHTML 1.0") and the allowable code will eventually be stricter. Tags that are being phased out are labeled "deprecated"--current browsers can still handle them, but if you want your site to keep up with future browsers, not to mention conform to accessibility requirements, you will want to get on top of XHTML.

Of course, Elizabeth Castro manages to write books that not only speak to those who are already fluent in HTML, but are good for newbies too. She makes it a breeze to create sites that are visually stylish and technically sophisticated without the expense of buying an editor.

Among the topics covered in her new book, HTML for the World Wide Web with XHTML and CSS: using the (relatively newer) structural tags (like doctype and div); correctly using older tags (like p and img) that have been modified in XHTML; writing XHTML so that formatting is done by the style sheets; writing those style sheets (cascading style sheets, a.k.a. "CSS"); creating a variety of layouts; and dealing with tables, frames, forms, multimedia, a bit of JavaScript (including mouseovers), WML (for mobile device displays), debugging, publishing, and publicizing your site.

As with all Visual QuickStart Guides, this one features clear and concise instructions side by side with well-captioned illustrations and screen shots that show both the source code and the resulting effect on the Web page. The index is extremely detailed, making this a great reference.

Also great for reference are the outstanding appendices. The first is an extensive list of tags and attributes, indicating which are deprecated and/or proprietary and on which page they are discussed. A similar appendix shows CSS properties and values; given the future of Web coding, this chart alone is worth the price of the book. Other handy charts cover intrinsic events, symbols and character Unicodes, and an expanded color chart that goes way beyond the virtually archaic Web-safe palette. All of which makes this a definite must-have for every Web designer's bookshelf. --Angelynn Grant

Top page
Go to store

Customer Reviews
(205 customer reviews)

 Great book!, 2010-03-05
This is a great book, especially for beginners! This book is also a great reference for even experienced coders! I highly recommend this book over other html and css books i have read.

 learning HTML, 2010-03-04
I am a student at the local community college so I am going through this book slowly and doing the exercises.
The book could be better.
At one point I had to create a br so that two lines of text could be indented.Even though, the exact text was not in the book, it suggested that I use tag to do the job. It didn't. I had to ask the head of the department to help and it took her 1/2 hour to debug. It didn't mention the tag to use, which finally solved the problem. However, the blockquote tag got almost a full page where the pre tag got one sentence. No wonder it was overlooked.

I haven't finished the book yet, but based on the first 5 chapters, I feel that it could be better and go into more detail.

 Should have been better, 2010-02-27
This book almost got 5 stars from me. It's hard to believe that a Visual QuickStart Guide (placing emphasis on the Visual) AND an expert author on formatting through CSS, the author failed to apply these principles to better aid the reader learn the material. This deficiency is found in many of the places in which she outlines the steps for doing something. She writes in bold what to type with the attribute and value all in the same font and weight. Visually it's not clear what is actually required code and what is a placeholder for something else. You need to continue reading the explanations to grasp what exactly to type. What is common convention to do in computer books is to format differently what one literally types, like the attribute name, from what is a placeholder, such as the value or what changes. What you exactly type as you see would be in bold for example and what you substitute for something else would be in normal weight and in italics. It was really all done the same everywhere. One never knows for sure which way it will be since sometimes one really type everything as it is written and at other times one does not. It's a good thing that with newer editions coming out of the woodwork very often the author can QuickStart to remedy this problem for the next edition.

 Good guide for the beginner, 2010-02-23
This is a good guide for the beginning web designer. A must have if you are just starting out.

 I generally liked the book but...., 2009-12-08
I think the errata, at the authors website, needs to be updated because there are even more mistakes in the book, mostly in the code examples, that have not been covered in the errata at the author's website. Also there are some errors in the code examples that does make it frustrating, as well. But, then again, it was a good exercise in trying to find out why the code wasn't working right..something one will have to do anyway. On the other hand, when one is new to the subject, and trying to learn something, it is nice to see how it is supposed to work right the first time. I am surprised that after, what 3 years, the code has not been corrected at the author's web site nor the errata more extensive.

The author made available, on her website, all of the code examples contained in the book...saving you the necessity of having to type it all out yourself. She also provided the code examples download in one complete zip file, as well. The file names in the zip file do not have any reference to a Chapter number or figure numbers so you have to hunt around, opening each one, to find the example you are looking for. Or, you can also open up her website index and cross reference to the Chapter and figure that way. I like the zipped file because I can run most programs without having to be online and at the author's web site. I renamed my unzipped files with the chapter and figure numbers(at least the html ones...the css ones are being referenced by the html ones when the programs are run).

All of the examples, for example, in Chapter 10 have the same code problem (specifically, if you click on "Park Guell" it is supposed to link down to "Park Guell" section but it doesn't do so because the did not match the . "Guell" was used in one and "milla" was used in the other. Another example in Ch 10 was in fig. 10.11 in the use of a:link, a:hover {font-weight:bold} which did not work but did work if I separated the a:link from the a:hover instead of having it on one line separated by a comma. Another example in several of the examples in Ch10 is the use of the same color for a:link and a:hover (why use the same color? you cannot tell the difference when hovering over the link.) In Ch8 fig 7.17 it showed color:rgb(%35,0%,50%) which wouldn't work until I discovered that the %35 should have been 35% which worked ok. I am using a Firefox browser and maybe some of the stuff I had problems with might have worked ok in another browser, I don't know. I am only half-way through the book and hope that there are no other coding or printed errors.

If it is true that the author came across as not favoring IE, I don't blame her. With the history of IE being constantly full of security leaks and Microsoft's reticence in patching them; and apparent obstinance, even arrogance, of accepting what works best and in the interest of it's users, I am surprised that IE still has the numbers of users that it does. But that's just my opinion...and the opinion of millions of others who wised up and bailed on IE for a more reliable, and less troublesome, browser. If you are still using IE I hope you are at least using Sandboxie as well which isn't a bad idea for any browser or email program you are running. You'd be surprised at how much junk (probably a lot of malware, etc) tries to sneak into your system..stuff you can see every time you clean out your Sandboxie at the end of every surfing session.