Customer Reviews

Sams Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML and XHTML in 21 Days, Professional Reference Edition (3rd Edition)

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

 

 

Speaking as a beginner, I found this book informative and user friendly.

It's a readable text book with summaries, workshops, question/answer, and exercises at the end of each chapter. A good way to test what you've learned in an interactive way.

It's step by step, ground-up approach helps you to get a rounded understanding of html and web page building. It not only tells you how to do things, but why you are doing it. It has plain english definitions and a nice reference section too.

The book has a slow "walk you through it" start. Within your first week you'll have a nice well-planned web page. A basic one, but one that will fill you with the confidence to say, "Yes, I can do this!". But as the pace picks-up, you will soon realize that the more you know... the more you don't know.

As much as it explains what to do, I still found myslf going "huh?". An absolute beginner may find this book a little confusing and overwhelming.

Don't let the "21 days" in the title fool you, this is a comprehensive book. As a beginner, it takes some studying. And this will take some time.

I give it four out of five stars. Lots of information with a friendly stlye. A good slow start that won't scare off the beginner, while not talking-down to the more advanced readers.

It's good for a beginner and it is good for the intermediate user. But it doesn't transition well between the two skill levels.

I picked up this book in March, 2002 with no prior knowledge of HTML. In less than three weeks I learned how to create good-looking web pages, featuring Cascading Style Sheets, in XHTML (the latest revision of HTHL).

This book is simply outstanding. Laura Lemay presents the markup language in a clear, easy-to-understand manner with excellent, real-world examples. You need no prior programming skills of any kind. Reading and working through the examples of this book has enabled me to create my own website in a matter of weeks.

For anyone who wants to learn HTML, I would strongly recommend this book.

I am a professional software developer. I've dabbled in HTML as part of my job, but in late 2001 decided to finally take the time to learn the latest HTML standards right. So I set out to find the best and most comprehensive HTML book there was. I considered the five most available and highly-rated ones: Laura Lemay's Teach Yourself (Professional Edition), The HTML Bible, the Wrox HTML book, Elizabeth's Visual QuickStart Guide, and Molly Holzschlag's Special Edition.

None of them are perfect, but Lemay's book seemed to be the best of the bunch - at the time (more on that later). I worked through it the hard way - from cover to cover. Now I can share with you my observations:

PROS:
1) Comprehensive coverage of almost all the important topics, from site planning, the HTML language itself, sound/video to design tips, site marketing and server admin. Its unrivaled breadth gives the novice a good survey of the entire field.
2) The comprehensiveness extends to the well-written appendices - HTML, CSS, Javascript, charset, color and MIME charts make this book a great all-in-one reference long after you've finished the lessons.
3) Commitment to XHTML1.0 means you will learn to do things the right way
4) The three meaty chapters on web server set-up and admin set this book apart, as are the chapters on site marketing and testing.
5) As for the basics, good coverage of text formatting and wrapping
6) Clean, readable writing and layout

CONS:
1) The only major shortfall - insubstantial CSS coverage. The future of page design deserves more than one rather generic chapter. Particularly annoying is Lemay's practice in early chapters of introducing classic formatting tags/attributes only to tell you it's deprecated in HTML 4.0. A comprehensive chart of old-vs-new practices at the end of the CSS chapter would have been helpful, as are re-implementations of all previous examples in standard-compliant HTML (especially for tables).
2) There should have been a few color insert-pages - to help explain the Using Colors section, at least! (I am thinking about the Color Wheel model in the old <i>Teach Yourself Web Design</i> book)
3) Laura Lemay is not a professional designer, and it shows. Look at any HTML book and you can tell whether the author is a Developer, a Tech Writer or a Designer. Lemay writes well and gives some good general design advices, but her example pages are uninspiring. Typography, an issue dear to designers and problematic in the web world, receives scant attention. To learn design, go to chapter 6, 7, 8, 12 of Robin William's "The Non-Designer's Web Book" for sharp and practical advices.
4) Skimpy on: WYSIWYG tools, Java, streaming, Flash, META tags, DNS and domain registration; no mention of the AOL browser
5) Needs better explanation of the DHTML concepts, especially diagrams that show how HTML, CSS and Javascript work together
6) Examples not consistently standard-compliant, Ch.20 errorneously states that Javascript array index starts with 1, and other minor editorial errors

What worries me though, is that the book is not being maintained. Its companion site is gone, and Laura herself stated on her site that she's retired. In contrast, Molly Holzschlag is an active member of the web designer community and her "Special Edition" was just updated last May - so that may be the new Gold Standard now.

It is a tribute to the rapid development of HTML that it now takes a book of this size to provide an overview of the basics. However, it is still possible to learn how to use HTML in a short time and this is a book that will help you do that. Organized into 21 basic lessons, the coverage is more than just how to use tags to make content. Days 16 through 21 are reserved for descriptions of how to avoid the common pitfalls of poor page design. This is a topic that is sometimes overlooked, which is unfortunate. In my experience, students find learning what the tags do to be very easy. The hard part is how to put them together to make something that is easy to understand.
The XHTML coverage is interleaved within the HTML when it makes sense and split into distinct lessons when it should be considered a separate topic. For example, the basic syntax rules concerning nested tags and the requirement of a closing tag are interleaved, but style sheets and the use of the DOCTYPE command to specify the DTD are in a separate lesson. This strategy works very well, easing the reader into XHTML by making it seem a natural evolution rather than a significant jump.
While the lessons are good and easy to follow, they are rather standard in coverage and difficulty. Written at a basic level, they can be understood by the raw beginner, although someone with HTML experience will no doubt find some topics or approaches of interest.
There is seemingly a countless number of books covering beginning HTML on the market today, with some better than others. This is one of the better rather than one of the others and will give you a sound foundation in the principles of HTML, both in structure and proper use.

Published in Mathematics and Computer Education, reprinted with permission

This is the professional reference third edition, complete with a CD-ROM that has source code examples, web graphics and sample software. This is a very easy-to-use, comprehensive book for learning either HTML or XHTML.
The clear step-by-step instructions in this book make it easy for even a beginner to gain hands-on practice with web page creation.
This book will teach you how to work with color, sound, animation and images.
I let my husband, who knows nothing about computers, take a look at this book and play around designing a web page. It was one of the few times he wasn't saying "honey, how do I.......?"
If you are a beginner, I'd definitely get this book. If you have some experience with HTML or XHTML, this would make an excellent reference edition for your bookshelf. The user level is beginner to intermediate.
I have spent a lot of time building web pages over the last four years and some of the information in this book was new to me.

This was my second attempt to teach myself HTML from a book. The first book was poorly organized and edited, leading me to give up a quarter of the way through. Lemay's book proved to be much better. I found the organization and page layout to be very helpful. The book was full of good examples, and having the examples available for downloading from a website was useful.

I liked the pace of the book - Lemay has broken the book into comfortable "day-sized" lessons, each covering a single coherent topic. This let me get a good understanding of a concept in a reasonable period of time, without feeling that I had too much to cover.

This book is certainly for the beginner. Anyone looking for in-depth coverage of intermediate-level topics will be disappointed. Lemay gave good examples of cascading style sheets (to the point were I could use one), but learning to use scripting and dynamic HTML would require buying one or more other books.

In short, I felt this book was well worth the cost for a solid introduction to HTML and designing web pages.

Believe this to be the best book I have read for learning and keeping up with HTML. You won't go wrong with this book. Very easy to read and understand. Great for the beginner and an excellent reference for the pro.

The book itself is well written, and I'm learning a lot from it. HOWEVER, the selling-point for me was, as advertised inside the back cover, the companion site with source code and graphics used in the examples in the book. Some competitors' books have a CD-ROM included, but I chose this one figuring accessing a Web site would be just as easy. Well, the Web site does not exist. Bringing this to the publisher's attention was a waste of time. They were neither concerned, apologetic, or interested in making any kind of effort to accept responsibility or rectify the situation. Bad customer service.... I'm quite annoyed.

If you want to learn HTML and XHTML this is the book to read. Some subjects are deeper covered than some others but this is the best guide for newbies and a very good reference for the advanced.

This book is good for starting to learn HTML with a plan to move on for further study. You will get detailed coverage for HTML, XHTML standards, and some introduction to Javascript, DynamicHTML, and a little more detailed introduction to Cascading Style Sheet technique. It is a good starting point if you intend to proceed learning XML and beyond. Otherwise there are more condensed books at the market if your intension is limited to preparing your own personal web site, or such. I thing some effort was spared in order to increase the volume of this publication, and there are unnecessary repetitions with no good purpose. Web design useability and artistic concepts are weak, although web publishing is claimed as the accomplishment. Technical details for launching web sites are also weak in the sense that you will need to cover other documents in order to achieve these tasks. Maybe it is a marketing strategy, because there are 'versions' of this book.