Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself® HTML 4

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

 

 

This is one of the worst editing jobs I have ever seen in published material. There is sometimes no continuity, incomplete sentences, no follow on explanations; just a poorly written and poorly edited book. You can learn a little about HTML, but it's a lot of work

When the author explains something, eg. tables, she notes that it will be explained more in a named chapter, then she doesn't. I also found that she gives alot of incomplete information. All this might be because I expected more information. A plus is that she does explain some very useful consepts on desighn and compatability.

This book can't seem to make up it's mind if it's a tutorial or a reference book, and in the end it does neither well. There are several cases where the text is talking about one thing and the images are illustrating something else. I have had to do to much of the work deciphering the information that is presented. I'm looking for another book.

I purchased this book to start learning HTML. While there appears to be a lot of information here, I found so many errors and omissions that I gave up after 115 pages. I just couldn't follow the examples, and found the page layout to be too confusing. The index didn't help much either - often pointing to a term used only once in the book without any further explanation. I bought a different book (by Laura Lemay) and have had much more success with the Lemay book.

Yes, it seems disjointed at times and has several spelling errors. However, for beginners like myself I have learnt that the best learning books for computer Newbies comprise of plenty of page graphics (close to 50% of content in this one) and practice exercises(end of every chapter !). Cottrell's book achieves both well enough. Most computer books do not, atleast for HTML learning that I have examined. Cottrell's book urges you to complete end of chapter questions with answers at the back for critical comprehension checking. It secondly includes a working case study exercise at the end of each chapter e.g, Chapter 4 p.67 on Tables - Shows a case study homepage and asks : 'What are the design issues with this page ? How did the author create it ? Identify each table, and any special formatting you see in the table.(Hint: there are nested tables on this page.) When you're done, go to [specified website address] and view the source code.' Gives her answer at the back of the book too. I would have liked to have seen MORE practice exercises... but this book has been great to check my understanding as a newbie. Nice work.

-Spiro Raftopoulos spiromlb@ozemail.com.au

This book has help me a lot. With it's easy interface and helpful visual pictures, I recommend this book completly.