Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Awesome if you're starting from scratch.
Comment: If you want to learn html and css and have little to know experience this is the book for you. It starts from scratch, but wastes little time and lets you get a basic page up and running fast. It's fun too; it explains techie language in plain English.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A wonderfully entertaining - and useful - tech manual! Who knew?
Comment: I would put myself in the "intermediate" HTML/CSS coding catagory, and there was still plenty for me in this book (even though it's designed for beginners). And that's the great part - beginners will definitely be able to undestand, learn, and design using this book, and people who already have a firm grasp of HTML and CSS will also find useful info in here.
Many people who have been coding for a while learned by doing, or learned haphazardly (like me), and as a result there are some basic concepts which I missed. This book addresses those concepts. And, XHTML is still new - and this book explains it - and why you may want to use it - superbly.
The most useful section for me (so far) is the chapter on code validation and etc. What a simple and straight-forward explanation! Now I can stop screaming at the validator, choose the right doctype, make a few minor adjustments (and switch to XHTML no less!) and have my code validate! Yay!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great introductory book
Comment: This is the perfect book if you are either brand new to web page development, or perhaps have dabbled in HTML before but want to get up to date with newer techniques such as layout using CSS etc. The approach is very much "learn by doing", you start with building basic pages and then these are built up and improved upon as you progress through the book. All files used in the book are available online, and all of the examples work!
Perhaps the best compliment I can pay this book is that I worked through all 658 pages in just over a week and thoroughly enjoyed doing so. Not many technical books you can say that about...
Customer Rating:
Summary: Superb
Comment: Okay - 103 positive reviews so far - will my voice count? I feel I owe it to the authors of this book to express my thoughts. So, here's my review, which I also posted on the publishers' (O'Reilly) site.
I spent five years designing table-based sites using Dreamweaver's Design Mode, during which I aged 10 years and pulled a bushel of hair. Recognizing at last - doh - that CSS/XHTML would give me wonderful control, I purchased four books and grimly vowed that I would learn HTML or die.
As it turned out, the experience was not grim. Three of the books were quite useful - but this was, by far, the best. (The others were Creating a Web Page With HTML, a really good 126-pg. quick tutorial by Elizabeth Castro; and CSS: The Missing Manual. I found Elizabeth Castro's longer book, HTML, XHTML, & CSS, less useful, as it contained little material that wasn't covered in the Head First and Missing Manual books).
I was initially a bit dumfounded by the simple language of the Head First book, but quickly accepted the Freemans' explanation of the underlying tested learning principles. And, indeed, I learned better with this book. Occasionally, I'll need to look in the Missing Manual - e.g., it includes more information on workarounds for Internet Explorer. But in all other respects, this is simply a wonderful introduction to HTML for beginners. I think it would also be excellent for designers who want to learn the basics of coding.
I'm still using Dreamweaver, but I'm screaming much less.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Made learning code easy!!
Comment: I cannot stress how terrific this book is....I wish every computer book were written like it!
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