Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: very good book
Comment: this is a very good book for beginners. TSTC Waco is using it for the intro class in the webmaster 2 year degree program. Covers HTML , XHTML, AND CSS STYLE SHEETS in detail. A lot of screen shots showing what the code should look like. Which, for a beginner is VERY IMPORTANT! If you do not know the code how else would you know that you got it right if something small is wrong. The only fault I have with the book compared to my first HTML book is there is not a quick reference card printed on the back cover. This is a minor thing but is handy for quick review.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Learning Tool for the non-technical
Comment: This is a true learner's guide to building standards-based Web pages. It includes a lot of information on common HTML and CSS traps and pitfalls as well as why common conceptions about style are often wrong. To help the reader actually learn the material in a fun and friendly manner it includes a lot of puzzles and exercises and other material that make it a joy to learn. This is truly a guide for the non-programmer that will have them quickly up to speed on how to design and build a web site. One of the virtues of this particular book is that the authors relate common problems and frustrations of users and how to avoid them in your website.
The authors take one of the most successful approaches to learning - read about it, try it, see the results, try something different, see the results, etc. Everything is done is a logical step-by-step fashion with small steps first explained and then applied and you see the results right away. An extensive introduction, it is one of the easiest and definitely the most fun way to learn HTML, CSS and XHTML from no knowledge to an intermediate level. Throughout the book the authors make great use of sidebars, photos, illustrations, notes, and other elements to keep the reader interested in the subject. Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML is highly recommended.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent learning tool
Comment: If you want to learn HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 (along with a healthy dose of CSS), this is the book.
You don't just read through the book. It is not laid out in the traditional "This is the 'a' tag, blah, blah, blah .. now the 'b' tag, blah, blah ..." After you wake up from your nap from reading those types of books, you haven't really learned a thing.
This book wants you to be involved. If you simply read through it, you are missing the point. There are many exercises that get you involved in writing the code. I'm a big believer in the "learn by doing" philosophy and this book lives by that credo.
Not only does it give you the code exercises, it tells you what the code you are writing does. And before you know it, by Chapter 7, you are writing strict XHTML 1.0 code. It sounds simplistic, but I've seen lots of books that simply throw the code at you and you are supposed to understand by osmosis, the force, or some deity exactly what you just wrote.
If there are any faults, Chapter 13 and 14 seem a bit out of place, but tables and forms are presented well. You'll also be chomping at the bit to learn CSS, but really have to wait until Chapter 8 -- this makes sense when you realize that the authors want you to get basic structure down before you tackle design.
Chapter 12 is worth the price of the book -- you can pretty much re-arrange some XHTML and CSS here and there and make a very professional page of your own. But by then, you really understand how everything works, so you can do a lot of educated tweaking.
Highly recommended -- would be a great textbook. As mentioned in other reviews, you might want to get a copy of the pocket references (you don't need the big versions after this book)for CSS and HTML/XHTML that O'Reilly puts out. They are about $10 US apiece and cover some of the few tags/selectors that the book doesn't cover.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Better than it looks
Comment: I passed over this book initially because it looked too goofy, and the first half of the book seemed to take a lot of pages to cover HTML, which I basically already knew. I picked up Richard York's Beginning CSS instead, because it seemed more serious, and it looked a lot more dense with technical detail.
What a mistake. Beginning CSS was incredibly obtuse and difficult to get through, and the examples were just ugly (not to mention they don't work properly in any browser). A couple hundred pages in, I got lost in all the "direct adjacent sibling combinators" and "@import notations" and I gave up.
Then I decided to give Head First HTML a shot. It's about the same thickness as Beginning CSS, but it's much much much easier to read. The type is bigger, and there are lots of illustrations and puzzles and what-not. Most importantly, it's written much more clearly. The examples are easy to code, they look great, and they actually work in real web browsers.
I got through the book in about a week and a half, and boom, I know how to write standards-compliant XHTML & CSS. Obviously, I still have plenty of room for advancement, but I know enough to put together some pretty decent web pages. The book is up-to-date (it even mentions iWeb, which was just released earlier this year), and it really does make the learning process easy and, dare I say, fun.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A good book for a newbie
Comment: This book is a good reference people who are beginner in HTML. I really loved this book!
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