Creating Cool Web Sites with HTML, XHTML, and CSS (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“…difficult to fault the quality of information provided…” (PC Utilities, August 2004)

Product Description

* Walks readers through the process of creating a basic Web site from scratch using HMTL, the basis for billions of Web pages, and then jazzing it up with advanced techniques from the author's award-winning sites
* This updated edition features new material that shows readers how to attract visitors to a site and keep them there, including new JavaScript examples and coverage of cascading style sheets and XHTML, technologies that make building successful Web sites even easier
* Also features exciting new tips and tricks for beginning and advanced users, as well as more expanded examples and samples for users to incorporate in their own sites
* The book moves from basic design and deployment to advanced page layout strategies, showing how to spice up new or existing sites with sound, video, and animation

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Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Wiley (May 7, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0764557386
• ISBN-13: 978-0764557385
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #209,400 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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  #43 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Programming > Languages & Tools > XHTML
  #58 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Programming > Languages & Tools > CSS

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very nice coverage of a wide range of topics..., May 29, 2004

By	Thomas Duff "Duffbert" (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Reasonable starting point for the beginner, September 4, 2004

By	Jack D. Herrington "engineer and author" (Silicon Valley, CA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Step by Step Guide, July 8, 2004

By	tietack "tietack" (West Coast USA) - See all my reviews

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.