Great hands-on HTML and CSS book for beginners
I am a 13-year-old middle school student who is studying some basic Web technology over the summer. This is my first time to learn HTML and CSS. After reading several books on this subject, by far this is the best book for beginners. I could follow and understand it easily. I finished the book in less than a month, and all exercises worked properly as shown in the book.
Here are some of the highlights in this book:
- On each chapter, the author clearly explains the covering concepts and he repeats them throughout the book so you won't forget them in later chapters.
- Through the tutorials that go along with each chapter, the hands-on technique makes applying the concept to the real world seem easier to understand and help with remembering what you learned.
I am so happy to read this book and would definitely recommend it to all beginners who are new to HTML and CSS.
Don't buy this
I hate how Amazon won't let you give an item zero stars.
This book was required by class, and that is the only reason I bought it. I can't say enough about how wretched this book is. If you're a beginner, this is not a book for you- go find something from the Classroom in a Book series. If you're like me and have been in web design a while and took a web design class in hopes of an easy A, you know this stuff already.
The book is laid out as a series of tutorials, which means you'll never find anything quickly. Each module has you coding HTML and CSS at the same time. Which theoretically could have worked, but they flip-flopped it so frequently that you couldn't always understand what they were trying to do exactly. I really think they should have given a good background in HTML first, then used the second half of the book to cover CSS (which I totally adore) and how it complements HTML.
What really burned me up was that the code in the book is often wrong. I cheat and use DreamWeaver when designing (and tweak the heck out of my code once it's roughed in) so I didn't really notice until my classmates (who were trying to hand code everything in Notepad) kept having validation issues despite having copied everything from the book exactly. I double checked the book against the W3C specifications and sure enough the coding in the book was wrong.
(2 reviews)
