Customer Reviews

HTML 4 Unleashed

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

This book is better than most other books for first time HTML programmers. It gives good introduction on related topics like JavaScript, Java, DHTML, Active X and VBScript. I got a good idea of HTML from this book but I went on to get two more HTML books for better reference and in-depth programming techniques. However, I would NOT recommend this book to someone who already knows basic HTML or who is looking for a good reference book on HTML. One important thing to note is that this book was basically written for HTML 3.2 and later when HTML 4 came, a few last minute changes were made to put 'HTML 4' on the cover. So this book does not cover HTML 4 the way it should. This book is badly in need of a revised edition.

This book is better than most other books for first time HTML programmers. It gives good introduction on related topics like JavaScript, Java, DHTML, Active X and VBScript. I got a good idea of HTML from this book but I went on to get two more HTML books for better reference and in-depth programming techniques. However, I would NOT recommend this book to someone who already knows basic HTML or who is looking for a good reference book on HTML. One important thing to note is that this book was basically written for HTML 3.2 and later when HTML 4 came, a few last minute changes were made to put 'HTML 4' on the cover. So this book does not cover HTML 4 the way it should.

This book is so tedious and hard to follow. I don't know why the author made simple HTML codes seem so difficult. It was tolerable at first since I knew some HTML already, but then when I got to the advanced part (such as Javascript), it was impossible to grasp the concept. I was so frustrated.

When I got this book, I had made a dozen family-style personal home pages. Nothing advanced, just basic stuff.

This book was great for me, because it gave me lots of basic html codes and it's all right there, easy to find and easy to understand. I couldn't for the life of me understand frames before this book, but how to do frames was explained so well that I had to laugh at the troubles I had had with them in the past.

This book also gets into some more advanced stuff, such as style sheets, and dynamic html. I had no experience in any of this, and I found that these things were not explained well enough for a novice such as myself to fully understand. I got lost.

Someone with SOME experience in these other things might find this book to be a great resource for dynamic html, but it was a bit too much of a jump for me. For a beginning web page developer, this is a good resource for the extensive html coding it presents. I can't say about the more advanced programming, as it wasn't helpful to me personally.

The meandering style employed by the author is only compounded by incomplete and incorrect examples repeatedly strewn throughout the book. This is perhaps one of the most poorly written books I have read on the HTML and I have read quite a few in the last 2 years.

If you did NOT return the book for a refund, then you really wasted your money. Lets just hope the author(s) (just who is 'et al'?) program better than they write.

Other Authors! Take a hint! Finally someone takes a language and does a COMPLETE book on it. I've read most of the technical books that refer to web development, and although they are each about different subjects, there is not a single one that can stand up to the thoroughness of this book. Along with a very intense main area, the book includes cross-browser reference (including versions of browsers) of ALL elements, attributes, and what code will work in the most popular browsers when the W3C's "Official" code is not yet implemented. Also contains VBScript, JavaScript reference tables, XSL, XML, DHTML and CGI information, and a fairly thorough listing of online references. If you are learning HTML, this is the only book you'll need, and it will get you started in the right direction with VBScript and JavaScript.

I found the book very helpfull, despite the very poor ratings everyone else gave this book! I basically learnt HTML 4 from this book, and I have made 6 or 7 very nice websites. This book teaches you basic HTML, frames, tables, a little CSS1, and besides, it's half the price it was half a year ago when I purchased it.

I think that the book is truely great for someone that just needs it around to double check things, in that case this book is all you need as far as HTML 4 goes. I don't think this is the best book to learn HTML from, but if you know HTML and just needs to familiarize yourself with HTML 4, then it serves it's purpose. The book skims through the basics and gets to the more advanced, then skims through that, which I don't value very much. I will especially disappointed with the coverage of CSS and JavaScript. I can't say I am going to never use the book, because I use it alot, but I was hoping that it would teach me more than it has. Overall, not a bad "REFERENCE" book, but you will need other books to accompany it on the shelf in order to become an expert.

Normally, I'm not a big fan of "Sam's Net Books". However, Mr. Darnell did a very good job with this book. Many of the available HTML books have only a few very small chapters written about HTML and the rest of the chapters are used to skim other languages that require a book in themselves. This book gives a lot of attention to HTML and when I buy a book on HTML, that's what I want! HTML is the core language of the web and this book provides a good working understanding of the latest version, 4.0. It also gives very nice, but not overdone, history lessons about HTML which further help to understand certain conventions. Additional languages are also covered in this book, as they are in most others. It's a lot of reading, but it's very well organized with a nice, clean format.

The proof readers did not do a thorough job checking out this text before it went to print, but I get the feeling from the substandard quality of other "unleashed" books that they really don't care. Poor writing, incomplete sections and glaring errors abound. I attempted to use this book a couple of times on things I was stuck on, but found that it only scratched the surface of very basic topics (forms and tables, for example). Examples were particularly unhelpful, and the CD is worthless. It seems like the more pages stuffed into a computer book (notice how the author brags about 1000+pages), the worse the quality of the material inside. However, there must be a lot of suckers out there buying these huge books and paying out of the nose for them, judging from how many huge book series there are.