Customer Rating: Summary: An excellent book... Comment: This is an excellent book in order to learn actual web page design. It's really easy to follow by non-english speakers (like me, I'm spanish).
It has a lot of usefull information about HTML, CSS and general web design.
Highly recommended!!! Customer Rating: Summary: Programmer Comment: I as a programmer think that this book is a productive book, the guy go over all the materials you need to learn step by step and smoothly. Customer Rating: Summary: Excellent - Informative Comment: It's an excellent and informative book! It helped me very much to teach the item to a very "difficult audience"! Customer Rating: Summary: Great teaching book Comment: Great introduction to front-end web programming using XHTML and CSS. It even gets into the nitty-gritty of SEO strategies, rating your site for child access, testing methods, and accessibility for the visually impaired. Also provides a good, although brief intro to JavaScript, database driven websites, and programming for mobile devices.
Yes there is a lot of repetition and a bit of wandering back and forth across subjects, and yes it can be annoying. But most books in this genre are guilty of that. This one is no better nor worse than the others. Nice reference and appendix. Recommended. Customer Rating: Summary: Hard to follow Comment: I have gone from being frustrated with this title to disliking it intensely. I would suggest alternate materials such as the O'Reilly publication, "HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide."
First, "BWP w/HTML, XHTML, and CSS" is dated. Its publication date is 2004. This text often complains that features "are not supported by browsers" that have since been updated. There are more current materials published within the last year. (And on the subject of browsers, I have not found a single mention of Mozilla, Safari, or Opera in this book).
Second, the author's presentation is often difficult to follow. Concedely it is a difficult subject to organize when there are "live" tags, "deprecated" tags, the ongoing effort to separate stylistic elements into CSS, and different browswers' idiosyncracies with which to deal. Duckett, however, is next to hopeless in separating these subjects.
Most critical is the fact that this book is a very unhappy blend between an introductory tutorial and a reference "bible." Duckett will introduce a basic concept -- say, "tables" and will then load up on all of the attributes that the element might take. Learning the key ideas gets lost in the process. The book often leads off into asides and references to more advanced topics that will easily lose the initiate. It is no coincidence that several of the reviews here use the word "intermediate" in connection with this text.
The author does not seem to understand the principle that individuals learn by working from the "known" step-by-step to the "unknown." Instead, he seems to rely upon the idea that "if I throw everything at them in a random fashion, they'll figure out a good amount of it."
As an example of its "random walk" approach, Chapter 4 first provides a sound introduction into the use of colors and making references to images. The closing section of the chapter, however, branches off into a discussion of the
This beginning guide reviews HTML and also introduces you to using XHTML for the structure of a web page and cascading style sheets (CSS) for controlling how a document should appear on a web page. Youll learn how to take advantage of the latest features of browsers while making sure that your pages still work in older, but popular, browsers. By incorporating usability and accessibility, youll be able to write professional-looking and well-coded web pages that use the latest technologies.
