Customer Reviews

Beginning HTML, XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)

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This might have been one of the best HTML guides of the late 1990s. As it is, the techniques are long out of date and certainly not to be recommended. As with far too many similar HTML books, it's a HTML 3.2 text with additions to "bring it up to date". As HTML 4 has been released for over 12 years now, that's just not good enough.

The approach here is to introduce the presentational use of HTML early on, and to think that by labeling each section and tag as "deprecated", that's an excuse - it isn't. Separation of markup and presentation needs to be explained from the outset, and when new readers are first taught presentation it should be through the use of CSS.

CSS is introduced here. It's a poor treatment, based (as usual) on explaining CSS properties one by one, rather than showing how to use the CSS tools to achieve page design tasks. In particular, the crucial technique of float is barely mentioned.

My recommendation for HTML + CSS texts is still Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML, followed up by Lie and Bos' Cascading Style Sheets. Those are two that not only teach correct descriptions of the tools, they also teach the right approaches for producing modern, best practice work.