Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Easy Read with a lot of good information
Comment: This book is excellent for the intermediate web designer. The book layout is appealing, and includes crossword puzzles for chapter keywords. There is a website that lists the websites presented in the book. The author makes a dry topic interesting and appealing. The book does have it's share of "for dummies" jokes and cartoons, but there is some valuable info in here, especially for CSS.
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Summary: It's nice to see a new approach to technical writing
Comment: When I got my copy I was surprised at the size of the book. As this is a beginner's text I expected it to be smaller. That's not a complaint, just an observation. This is a meaty volume.
With all the buzz about Head First I was interested to see if this series really offers something new. The short answer is yes. The authors have attempted to make learning HTML and CSS easy and fun. That's a big order, though they have succeeded as well as anybody and better than most.
Instead of pages and pages of dry text, Headfirst HTML interjects lots of images and learning games. There are exercises in matching, even crossword puzzles to keep the material from getting too dry.
Some people have complained about the repetition in the book. It is certainly there. The authors even mention this in the forward. For the most part it is well done. Learning requires repetition and learning requires repetition too. Having taught web design to adults, this has become very obvious to me. Fortunately the authors do a better job of repeating themselves in different and interesting ways than I am able to.
Will this book work for everybody? No. It does make good use of modern learning theory to break the material into digestible chunks that are offered in a logical and sequential manner. I'm very impressed. But as with any training sequence it needs to be followed and worked.
If you like to try things out yourself then check a reference work to get you past your stuck points you would be better served by something like the "HTML for the World Wide Web: Visual Quickstart Guide" or "Web Design in a Nutshell". If you are good at following training programs in order and take the time to work through this book you will know more HTML than most web designers. And your knowledge will be current and standards compliant.
This is an excellent training manual but a poor reference book. So, if you are looking for solid, well designed sequential training course, I highly recommend this. If you won't take the time to work the book, look elsewhere.
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Summary: The perfect book for beginners in serious web design
Comment: I can't say enough good things about this book. I was a beginning web page designer, using tools like FreeWay Express, GoLive, and Dreamweaver. The whole idea of visual based layout, at first thought, sounds like the right way to go. Just buy a $300 program, and you're bound to produce impressive web sites, right?
Wrong!! Do not take this approach. The wonder of this book is that it removes the fear of writing the code, instead of using WYSIWYG editors. The frustration of using GoLive is over, I now write all my web pages in a simple text editor, and I actually understand what I am doing !!
Do NOT be afraid of this process. Once you learn the basics of writing the code, you can still use the Dreamweavers to do certain things. But you never actually understand what you are doing without learning the code.
This book makes it way too easy to learn the code. They also add appropriate focus to minimal code, removing the fat, and stress the importance of standards. Now, when I go to an interesting web site, I view their code. Sometimes I laugh at them, sometimes I admire them. The point is, now you will understand why.
The last hurdle will be to gain some good Photoshop skills, but that's outside the realm of this book. YOU NEED TO BUY THIS BOOK !!!!!!
Customer Rating:
Summary: The K&R Book For Web Developers!
Comment: The current version of XHTML & CSS look to be as solid of a foundation in the future of web development as the C language has been over the past 30 years. This book is as elegant, timeless and appealing as 'The C Programming Language' book. The Q & A sections are as close to a virtual classroom experience as I've ever seen.
Since this 'Head First' series focuses on teaching you HOW to think, it is perfect for this subject. It primes you well for really knowing the important stuff that Dreamweaver does not do for you. Just like with C, a solid understanding of this material will make sense of most of the hundreds of features available to you in today's powerful development tools.
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Summary: A new classic
Comment: A whole generation of designers and developers learned HTML using books from the kind of Laura Lemay and Lynda Weinmann. Those books were still valuable until a few years ago, but they are now totally outdated. This new title from Eric and Elisabeth Freeman is the answer, a new classic title to help a brand new generation of designers and developers. I wish I had a book like this one when I started out
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