Customer Reviews

Creating Cool Web Sites with HTML, XHTML, and CSS

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Target Audience
Beginning web designers or web designers who want to grow beyond single page designs.

Contents
This is a reference/tutorial guide to web technologies that are necessary to build web sites. The book is divided into three parts:

Part 1 - Building A Wicked Cool Web Page - So What's All This Web Jazz?; Building Your First Web Page: HTML Basics; Presenting Text Attractively; Moving Into The 21st Century With Cascading Style Sheets; Lists And Special Characters; Putting The Web In World Wide Web: Adding Pointers And Links; From Dull To Cool By Adding Graphics
Part 2 - Rockin' Page Design Strategies - Tables And Frames; Forms, User Input, and the Common Gateway Interface; Advanced Form Design; Activating Your Pages With JavaScript; Advanced Cascading Style Sheets; Site Development With Weblogs
Part 3 - Expanding Your Pages Into A Web Site - Web Sites versus Web Pages; Thinking About Your Visitors And Your Site's Usability; Validating Your Pages And Style Sheets; Building Traffic And Being Found; Closing Thoughts; Appendix A: Step-by-step Web Site Planning Guide; Appendix B: Finding A Home For Your Web Site; Index

Review
If you're just starting out with learning how to build Web pages or sites, you no doubt have a wide number of books to choose from to help you learn those skills. But you can easily get bogged down in the minutiae of every little HTML tag and still not know what CSS means. You need a readable book that gives you solid coverage of essential information. With that in mind, you should check out Creating Cool Web Sites With HTML, XHTML, and CSS by Dave Taylor.

To position this properly, let's make sure you're the right audience. This isn't a book that will teach new tricks to an experienced web designer who earns their living developing corporate web sites. This book does an excellent job in covering a lot of ground without needing 1000+ pages to do so. Taylor takes you through the basics of HTML and XHTML, as well as how to use CSS to add formatting and presentation to your page. There's even some coverage of JavaScript as well. As you continue to gain expertise in each of these areas, you will probably want a hard-core reference manual to continue your education, but Creating Cool Web Sites will give you the necessary foundation to get started.

While targeted more towards beginners, the information in part 3 is a worthy read for a larger audience. To properly build a web site, you have to think of it as a cohesive whole, not just a collection of separate pages. The author helps the reader think through site issues, such as traffic, accessibility, and so on. Once again, any one of these topics could be a book on its own, but this is a nice level of coverage for initial exposure and to get started.

Conclusion
Beginners will find this to be an approachable coverage of web technologies, while intermediate designers will probably gravitate to the Web site design and CSS information.

It's not about learning keys strokes, or commands with HTML. It's about learning the syntax of the language. It's about having an idea about what you want your site to convey, and how you want it to look and expressing it through HTML. So a book that teaches HTML must acts as language primer and select a subset of the language to introduce.

This is exactly what this book does. It doesn't provide in-depth coverage of every detail of every tag. It provides an overall look at HTML, then page design, then site design. As such, this is a good book to take you from zero to beginner with HTML. To advance beyond there you will want a book like O'Reilly's "HTML: The Definitive Guide", or moving beyond that O'Reilly's massive "Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference".

I recommend this book for absolute beginners who know nothing about the web and who want to build sites. There is enough there to get you up the ramp of basic knowledge and to get you pointed in the right direction. Sure there are problems, some of the topics (Java, XSLT) could be stripped altogether, but in generally it's a consistently high quality book that covers the three fundamentals; HTML, Page Design and Site Design.

If you want a Web site with more than the cookie-cutter templates offered by Front Page, read this book! It takes the intimidation out of those weird looking HTML, CSS, and Javascript commands, and gives you the tools to bring your Web sites into the 21st century.

Dave gives us the benefit of his experience with a wide variety of browsers on Microsoft, Macintosh, and Unix/Linux platforms, which can help you bring your Web site to the widest possible audience.

This book reminds me of the old game creation books, which build your skills step by step. By the end, I got the same feeling of joy that I got after coding my first version of Space Invaders.

It starts with instructions on how to create simple Web pages. By the time you're done, you'll know how to create the Web pages that work best for you.

When you read this book, follow along with a text editor and the browser(s) of your choice. Dave builds your skills, step by step. You'll be pleasantly surprised by the Web pages that you create.

I've been using a very dated GUI web design tool for years (Claris Home Page 3.0) and I needed to finally learn some current rules and the basics. This book was perfect! I'm now using pure HTML and I'm working towards XHTML and CSS. I feel like I'm on the cutting edge now. What an excellent choice I made in selecting this book out of dozens on the shelf.

Learn Web site design the easy way, from a gifted teacher! Dave Taylor is one of those rare authors that is truly gifted at teaching his subject. He makes HTML easy to understand and enjoyable.

I do a little programming and recently got involved with doing some CGI stuff for a website. The CGI stuff came easy, but my site design was extremely lame. This book makes it simple to move beyond the boring and put in a little fun.

My two daughters are interested in doing Web design and kept taking my book, so I bought two more copies for them.

If you are just starting out, this is the place to start!

I have reviewed and purchased many html/webdesign books. Creating Cool Web Sites : with HTML, XHTML, and CSS
by Dave Taylor is one of the few that I would recommend that you purchase. If you are a beginnner or have intermediate web design skills, you will learn a lot from this book. For the advanced designer, while there may not be anything that is new to you, it will likely teach you a better way to do something, or refresh your memory on the correct way to do something.

For someone not experienced in CSS, start with this book, you may not have to look anywhere else. CSS is a great web technology and if you are not using it, you are missing out.

Dave's writing style makes it easy for you to follow and learn from this book. The book has a good mixure of code, images, and words to make this a learning experience.

This is definitely a book I strongly recommend for anyone who wants to start creating their own web pages.

I think the one thing that impressed me the most about this book was that the author didn't mention FrontPage or any other Web creation tool. He didn't even mention using Word, other than as a cautionary "Don't". No, he suggests Notepad, Mac TextEdit, or vi, pico etc. That alone is so refreshing.

But there's a lot more to like. This is a complete, soup to nuts, "getting started with web pages" guide that brings you from simple HTML right through Javascript, Cascading Style Sheets, basic forms, and even validation tools. The style is practical, with useful examples that don't get bogged down trying to cover every single aspect of every single tag. Yes, you'll want other, more comprehensive references later in your learning, but this really is a fast on-ramp to that Information Superhighway we used to hear so much about.

I didn't honestly expect to learn a lot from this, but I was pleasantly surprised to pick up a few pointers on things I missed in more detailed documentation. There were a few things here and there I took some exception to - things that aren't "wrong", but aren't entirely "right" either, but really these were just expository opinon: I would have explained them differently. One or two small and easily understood typo's didn't mar my enjoyment either.

This is definitely a book I can strongly recommend for someone who wants to start writing their own web pages.

And I don't even play one on TV. But I sometimes find myself having to do techie things, such as making revisions to my Web site, or trying to figure out why the $%@!#$ thing isn't doing what I thought it was supposed to do. That is when I reach for this book.

Dave Taylor is a techie, but fortunately for us, he is able to communicate with those of us for whom HTML, CSS and XHTML are not our native languages. The explanations and examples in the book are easy to follow, and the companion Web site provides additional information.

Although the reason I wanted this book was to help with coding issues, it is much more. Creating Cool Web Sites is a one-stop shop with information about building Web pages, adding features such as graphics, audio and video, forms, and more. You even get suggestions on making your site more user-friendly, and attracting search engines and visitors.

There are hundreds of books out there about HTML, CSS, Web design, graphics, Java script, RSS, search engine marketing, etc. If you want one book that will explain all of this to you from start to finish in easy-to-understand language, Creating Cool Web Sites is the one you need.

Cathy Stucker, IdeaLady.com

This is one of the best organized, well-written technical books I have encountered in the last 15 years! The examples in the book and the companion web-site make step by step learning simple and clear. I went from knowing nothing about creating a website to launching one in one week, using no other references. This book is a must-read for anyone getting started on the web.This is a concise, fact and example-packed, logical guide to getting up and running - a keeper for sure!

This book is great for teaching you how HTML really works. He provides a lot of good examples and makes some fairly difficult concepts easy-to-understand. I wish I'd had this book when I began learning HTML.