tutorial
I bought this as the required text for a college class. It is a tutorial supported with online material. Expensive but thorough. Not indexed well enough to be a reference but an effective teaching text if you start at the beginning and invest the hours to get to the end.
Lots of text but very little useful information
If you have to buy this book for a class, then buy it. If not, stick with Google. I found more useful and relevant information by using Google and looking through the search results than this book provided.
Great Resource- Albeit Tedious
I needed this book for a class, otherwise I wouldn't even have touched a web design book. (You could learn more from Google, for free.)
However, I did like the level of depth this book went into. It goes beyond the call of duty by even going through javascript- great touch!
The only thing I can brag about is that this book is popular- so the examples and case problems are all online. This makes it easy to get "help" if you didn't have time to do your work.
Without the class, I would still never buy this book. It's too wordy at times, and beats you over the head with what you already know.
I'd say buy it if you need it for a class, otherwise you can skip it.
Confusing and too wordy
This book is confusing and the explanations just go on and on. You can follow this book for pages and not be sure how you ended up with what you did. There are other, easier to read books on XHTML and HTML avaialable.
Very good value
When I through the first few chapters, I liked the book already. First it emphasize that the book only covers coding on Notepad or other text editors. I think that is the best way to learn the language. It doesn't need any HTML editors to do the job. It describes the history of internet and its technologies in some of the chapters. It covers the javascript concepts clearly and shows how things are done, step by step. At the end of each chapter, there are some assignments to enhance understanding. There are hints on how these assignments should be done, step by step also. Sometimes even with the hints, they are not easy to perform, especially for DHTML/Javascript, in many cases, I have to go back to the chapter and re-examine the reasons for writing certain functions, when to call the functions and so forth. This book is suitable for beginners with no HTML knowledge and don't want to code with HTML editors. Thankfully, there are some appendices to the tags used for XHTML, and examined the browser compatibilities also. I print out these appendices to allow me to summarise the book and to carry along. As with most books, this book also contain some errors especially with the answers provided, but it is of little problem if you went through the book thoroughly, you can spot them quite easily. There is another book, "New perspectives on Javascript" by the same author which covers mostly Javascript is not so good value, as a lot of Javascript stuff in that book is already covered here. For more seasoned HTML coders, this book is not so suitable, but if you want to learn new ways of coding to comply with new XHTML standards, you should give this book a look.
