Customer Reviews

Sams Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML and CSS in One Hour a Day (5th Edition)

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

 

 

I'm about 1/3 of the way through the book right now, and I am pleased with it so far. I'm pretty familiar with computers and the Internet already, but the authors include enough information for beginniers to get a good grasp on the terminology early on.

The book breaks down the material into 21 lessons, implying that each one should take one hour per day. A word of warning: you'll probably need more than an hour unless you're a really quick study. The early lessons are pretty basic and go by quickly, but by lessons 5 & 6 the terminology starts coming fast. The authors offer several suggestions for HTML editors to use while reading the book, and I highly recommend downloading one (I use the free HTML-Kit, and it works quite well).

I do have a few complaints. The authors seem to spend a lot of time covering "deprecated" HTML tags, which are considered outdated in favor of CSS. They say that it these tags are good ot know if you find them in older websites, but for someone like me who is new to HTML, including the old tags with the new is a bit confusing, and I frequently have to check the appendix to make sure that the tag I'm using is not obsolete. CSS has not been covered extensively yet (it looks like lesson 9 will do that), but it looks pretty different from HTML. If a new edition of this book is made, the authors need to ditch the outdated HTML and include the CSS right from the beginning.

My other complaint is that, for a book on HTML, the examples aren't that well edited. I just finished lesson 7 and was having a difficult time adding color to my pages until I realized that the author(s) had accidentally used a comma instead of a semicolon. That tiny mistake made a huge difference, and it's not the only tiny mistake they made.

This is my second Laura LeMay book. I like her writing style and the many examples and screen shots in this book. She tells you the pros and cons of using different techniques and how to make your web sites more cross-browser compliant. XHTML is covered, as is some JavaScript and Dynamic HTML and AJAX, and how to integrate multimedia into your web site. There are also plenty of references for more information on all things web site creation related. This book contains a wealth of information.

This is one of the better written Web books I have read. Everything is well organized, with lots of relevant topics and useful examples. Even if you have prior experience with web design, it's not a bad idea to delve into these pages as a refresher and for guidelines on current HTML and XHTML standards.

The authors go the next step by introducing some of the more dynamic components of web design including client side Javascript and PHP for server-side scripts (along with a quick overview of ASP and JSP). These sections are quite brief for the most part (which should not come as a surprise in a book titled 'HTML and CSS'), but will help steer budding designers towards their next challenge.

I would certain recommend this book to anyone who is new to web design. It does much more than just teach you about HTML and CSS. The book progresses quickly, but not too quickly, and you will find yourself putting together your own interesting looking web pages in no time.

I purchased this book for a college course I am taking titled "Web Design and Development". The instructor chose the the textbook but it is well written and has numerous examples of good web site and page design. Gets into some of the more advanced features of creating web pages using XHTML and CSS. I would recommend this book for a beginning web programmer or administrator.

This book is well written and easy to follow. It's a very good way to learn HTML.

and then the bottom falls out. This book is fantastic as far as a beginner or review course for html and basic CSS. However . . . the chapter on CSS layouts and positioning (lesson 9) leaves ALOT to be desired. I became completely lost when I reached this chapter. I don't know which one of the authors handled this lesson but I'm hoping they'll fix it for future editions. They assume that the audience knows more than they should about class and IDs without ever providing adequate examples. The examples that are provided seem to skip steps. Still a good book but if you're new to CSS layouts and positioning like me, you're better off googling a CSS tutorial for beginners.

If you want to spend hours reading about html, this is the book for you. To be fair, I used a free online tutorial ([...]) to teach myself html and CSS and it worked well for me because it teaches you everything you need to know and takes you through the lessons quickly with no extra fluff. I definitely won't say that this book isn't useful, but it isn't easy to read and it takes much longer to understand the concepts than it should. Plus it mixes in CSS near the beginning without explaining it.
It does split everything into lessons, which makes for a more orderly learning experience. Overall, only buy this book if you need it for a class.

This Laura Lemay person is associated with a lot of well received books. This one, different in substance from her others, while there is not much in great depth, there is quite a bit of good stuff here. What is here, is well presented, good examples, and more for the beginning and intermediate reader. Good intro to CSS, some Javascript and ajax. This is a good buy (here at Amazon, I paid ~$22) . Get'em while they're hot.

I remember Lemay's earlier books, and that she's a good writer. I was ready to pick this one up, but early on, when the authors write about DOCTYPE, they say "you don't really need it" - if you leave it out you'll be OK.

That's as bad as saying "just leave out HEAD and BODY, it'll work anyway".

It might work, but you really need to specify DOCTYPE if you're going to build websites.

A big error like that makes me wonder how much the've left out or skimmed over in the rest of the book.

I'd call this a "Getting Started" book - one to get your feet wet. But you'll need to go on to other, better books if you really want to do HTML & CSS.