HTML and CSS: Design and Build Websites

A good book for review

When I first mentioned to a computer scientist friend that I bought a book to learn HTML, his response was "why would you use a book?" The fact of the matter is that while the material of any non-fiction piece can be found via the internet, the knowledge of HTML is particularly accessible; as of my writing this a Google search of "HTML tutorial" generated over 300 million hits. With websites devoted to the subject like w3schools.com and htmldog.com why should you buy a book? This is the most general question to answer.The benefit of this book is that it is very well written, organized, and easy to follow; this is where a book can do better than the internet. That begin said, this book is truly for beginners - it assumes you know nothing about HTML or mark-up language structure. The book is divided into two halves: one html (structure) and the other CSS (formatting). The first chapter is devoted to basic text pages. Then the following chapters describe the basic elements of which most web pages are composed: lists, links, images, and tables. The second half covers how to make these elements pretty. There are two major benefits from this book in terms of content. First, there are many little external references that can help you find what you need; for example, [...] is listed as one way to crop pictures (granted I usually do this in iphoto). Secondly, while the text does not teach you everything, it gives you an idea what to Google to learn more. The text gives you a broad overview of the main topics and once you understand the buzzwords you can dig deeper.One aspect of website design is to make something look good. This book looks really good. All of the diagrams are extremely clear and ample whitespace is used to create a nice flow. At the beginning, Mr. Duckett outlines the color-coding he will use for each type of page (i.e. title, summary, etc..) to help guide the reader. The choices make the pages stand out even when the only feature of the page type is a background color. He also spends time in some of the chapters discussing artistic features such as contrast and why to use png versus jpg format for images. These additions add a useful aspect to a book that really could just be about coding. I also think style is extremely important to keep in mind when making a website.Overall I think this book is a good starting point if you want to make a website with little to no knowledge of coding languages. It is extremely well organized and clear. Furthermore, I used to as a starting point for my own website. However, I can see how someone would instead use the free resources available online. I have frequently consulted these myself for more detail.

Generally, books on this subject tend to do two things:1. Read like dry manuals or reference books mentioning all the features of a language.2. Provide examples demonstrating the concepts described on prior pages.The problem with 1) is that such a presentation style is better suited to curing insomnia or using the book as a doorstop. Most of our brains cannot learn anything useful simply be memorizing the numerous HTML and CSS rules. The problem with 2) is that the examples shown rarely look like anything you see out there in the real world. There seems to be a large disconnect between knowing HTML/CSS rules/Toy examples and creating a beautiful looking website that you feel is doable on your own. This book overcomes both these flaws rather well.It is fairly thorough in its treatment of HTML tags and CSS rules to manipulate these tags, but it rarely feels like it is cumbersome to make it through a page. Each concept is given its own page, and the reader is never overwhelmed by excessive sidebars that contain silly jokes or "hey don't forget this when using that feature". The examples start out from simple and by the end, you are creating websites with a reasonable amount of complexity - and you are often presented links and suggestions to how the design can be enhanced along the way - for instance using CSS frameworks to visually grid your website before writing any code. This book is, like many other reviewers have said, beautifully laid out. The author is clearly a designer who can explain technical details well but without sacrificing the power of visualization to convey a message. This is no small feat - I haven't come across a single technical book that does this anywhere as well as this one does.While reading this book, it made me want keep working my way through it and Chapter 15, which is the chapter on using CSS for layout, is really wonderful in the way it brings together everything you have learned until that point. It really gets the message across that web design is a combination of well defined structure and artistic beauty.This book is an introduction, and a very good one. But it isn't all you need. It serves as an inspiration to bigger things, and provides a solid foundation. There is the occasional typo in the book (but nothing too serious) and there are times, particularly in the later chapters, where I wish the author would do a little more hand-holding through the code, but these are minor and mostly irrelevant quibbles that shouldn't take anything away from a must-have book for budding web designers.Dear author, in case you are reading this, will you write a book on using Javascript for web design as well? I know I'll buy it.