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.

I bought this book for a project several years ago and still prefer to use it as a go-to reference where I am uncertain of my basics in an area. I believe I prefer to use this book as 1. It is one of the easiest books to look at that I have, 2. the data is very succinct and well organized, 3. it's nice to take a break from my screens.

More on point 1: the quality of the design and quality of materials (good paper, lots and lots of color well-utilized) are supurb. This is not one of the "dime-a-dozen" techie books; it's in a class by itself. The whole of HTML and CSS could be done away with and I'd keep the book just to look at.

I am a Masters student in Computer Science, so when I had to learn HTML and CSS in a hurry to help out a friend with her website, I wasn't looking forward to going through another dense programming textbook to pick up something that should be simple, visual, and fun. Luckily for me, I found this book. It's presented in an elegant, graphical format with sparing use of text- almost like a picture book. It's the perfect format for a book whose goal is to teach a language primarily used to present things visually- can't believe it took someone this long to figure out. It is clearly intended for people in creative fields like graphic design, who have little to no programming experience but could benefit from learning HTML and CSS. While it should really resonate with that demographic, it's also sufficiently deep to be a welcome addition to the bookshelf of seasoned developers.

Despite how little text you have to pore through, this book covers a remarkable amount of material and in plenty of depth for most people. It's incredibly well planned-out and seems to offer and omit just the right information. The author also offers a lot of great background info on each topic which I think will be very helpful for most people. The writing is clear, concise, and not too dry. It made for an engaging and informative read-through, and has been serving as a fantastic reference ever since. Among other strengths of this book, the index is very well done and I find myself reaching for this book as a reference almost as often as Googling some question I have.

While I think that this book is impressive overall and I'd recommend it even on the merits of how darn good it looks, I have a couple suggestions for the next version. First, the cover curled up almost instantly, which is kind of a bummer. Second, I think that given the (intentional) simplicity of the material, it would be useful to include a couple of pages at the end presenting some more advanced concepts people should be aware of (e.g. JavaScript/jQuery/AJAX, mobile design techniques, PHP, databases, etc.), and a brief explanation of each. I know this book is super entry-level, but almost anyone who's writing HTML will at some point run across these terms and might find them confusing.

My background: I wanted to set out to learn how to build websites, I wanted to start simple with static websites made entirely of HTML and CSS and then move on to more dynamic websites with javascript and php. In my journey so far I picked up O'reily's head first with HTML first, and this was an excellent primer for me. I also checked out about 3 other books on HTML and CSS. I think O'reily's was wordier but it certainly covered everything, but enough about O'reily's. HTML and CSS: Design and Build Websites is an excellent book, it's very well styled, well written and for the most part explains everything well. It's an excellent book for beginners and possibly also a good book for some intermediate website developers. Where I feel the book falls short is in two areas: 1) the explanation for just about everything is given the same weight 2) The code examples on their websites are not easily accessible. Let me clarify #2 first since it's fairly simple: For example, the chapter on layout has a beautiful website that you get to design, all of the code is in the book and you can of course access the code online by looking at the page source, but wouldn't it have been a lot simpler if they simply made a zip file for their users to download? That way the hierarchical structure is kept, but also then all of the images are there too. I was unable to get all of the images and so I simply cannot recreate their example offline, a real shame considering it's essentially the finale of the whole book, a culmination of everything learned wrapped into one beautiful example, unfortunately not to be recreated by the reader of the book in its entirety.

Now to my first gripe. Although it's nice that they went into equal nice amounts of detail on everything covered in the book, certain topics should have simply been given more weight because of their importance and complexity. For instance, floats should probably have more detail and information about them than say, how to adjust the line-height. Of course the line-height should still be discussed but it should have some space in the book taken from it and given to floats. I could go on and on, but very simply the more complex areas should be given more weight. This isn't to say that they leave you hanging completely, they do discuss floats, just not enough in my opinion. In addition, things like "clearfix" should be discussed more, and a few other topics.

Ultimately these two things are why I gave the review 4 stars, which in my mind is still pretty good, because this book is pretty good and still worth getting. If you're on a journey to teach yourself how to build websites, this book should be in your arsenal along with O'reily's head first HTML.

I got this book a few days ago, I like it! I have no reason to give anything below 5 stars. I am satisfied with it for a few reasons which I’ll list here.

To the people buying this book READ THIS!

This book requires no previous knowledge to understand it. Though it’s worth noting that it goes a bit fast on some pages. If you have a terrible memory and need tons of examples on 1 thing, I’d go with the head first guide to HTML CSS & XHTML. That book goes over everything at a LOT slower pace. I read that book before this one and I still found things I didn’t know about HTML and CSS. I have been programming for a few months now and I’ve learned a ton of helpful things from this book that I never knew before, which is cool. The book had 50-star quality! I bought my book new due to the complaints of people getting broken books. The new book option is worth it if you are a person that hates even the slightest dent in your book. If you don’t care about the condition and only want the knowledge then used is good too.

The book is easy to read with examples that are labeled clearly. They give you a start code and an end code, both showing the start and end of the code and page to see where your at. Good colors in my opinion! Very informative and REALLY good for the price from what I’ve seen! So yeah, I‘ve enjoyed the book so far and I’m on page 200 or so. I just bought the JavaScript version of this book it’s coming tomorrow! 5 stars. Good for beginners. It goes over the most important stuff plus extra, you’ll definitely be able to write a few lines of code after reading and have a good understanding of the language.

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.

Overall, this is a very good book. The topic is a tricky subject to address but the author handles the material like a pro. I've noticed that many books present programming concepts which read more like technical manuals for experienced users. I'm completely new to programming/scripting and this book treated me like I was an noob, which is exactly what I wanted! It effectively uses "white space" so that the information and concepts are not overwhelming and easier to understand.

Using the principles in this book, I have built a few web pages/sites and forms that actually look pretty good. I'm not saying they're professional (dynamic) by any means, but for someone who barely knew how to spell HTML three months ago I'd say that's pretty good. And, I really think that's what this book is trying to accomplish. It's just providing the basic structure of HTML and CSS so that the user can build off a solid framework.

One of the things I really liked was the "It's true for now" approach. For example, the first time you're introduced to adding text fields the book tells you how to control their size within the HTML script (e.g. col="2" row="3"). Then, later in the book the author tells that the most appropriate means of controlling text fields is via CSS, e.g. width: 50px; height: 100px. Some people may find this approach misleading or redundant, I, however, do not. I appreciate the author presents both approaches so that I can A) Choose which one to use; and B) Recognize it when I come across it in older web pages and designs (the author makes this point multiple times throughout the book).

While this book is not nearly as complete as other books (say a Joel Murach publication) I don't think it's trying to be. It's short, concise and contains enough information to be extremely useful while not overwhelming. A very good book for complete beginners who want to begin web page design in HTML and CSS. I would also recommend it for people looking for a quick reference of current scripting practices and concepts.

Very well done.

Excellent book for any skill-level, but essential to all beginners! The content is laid out in a very fun fashionable way that will hold the reader's interest. The content is clear, concise and well-ordered. I once believed that once you've seen one HTML+CSS book, you've seen them all, but this one is truly one of a kind. The paper quality and design is bar-none a graphical artist's dream.

HOWEVER...

The build quality. Upon first time cracking this book open, you will feel how stiff and sensitive the binding is. I am very afraid to press down on the spine to get the book to lay down more flat to make reading words closer to inside the page simple. Judging by other reviewers, my fear is truly founded. But for now, all is intact. Will update if there are any changes to this current event...

[update, 2019]

Rather late, but this is something that I feel is worth mention & may help others:

My copy is still intact (paperback) with no loose pages. Same goes for my hardback copy of the JS/SQ companion text. Both have been well-used during my autodidactic journey. The style-system Duckett has created here is what sets this text series apart from all other books I've read and own.

I still recommend this book, however, there is no such thing as "the perfect technical book." I feel there are a few crucial lessons missing from this text: a chapter on media queries (mobile-first approach) and a decent overview of a couple CSS frameworks. While Duckett does introduce the ability to control min- and max- widths, and he offers a section on liquid layouts, mobile-first responsive pages are, more or less, the standard of today. This is not a complaint, whatsoever, but just something I felt it lacked and could use in a later edition, perhaps.

STILL A 5-STAR RECOMMENDATION IN AUG. 2019!

I like ordering from Amazon because their items are legit,packed properly and and have customer care eventhough you dont like an order they can take it back and bring what you like

Llegó un poco maltratado pero el contenido es muy bueno y gráfico.

Es un buen libro para los que estamos iniciando en el mundo de HTML.

I need it for work

Excellent book to learn from. Well-written and structured.

This book is excellent for people wanting to learn how to design websites. It's seperated into 3 parts: The first 9 Chapters teach you everything you need to know about HTML, the next 6 teach you about CSS and the remaining 3 tell you practical tips. The author really knows how to explain things well, every single element you learn has an example code with it and the book is filled with pictures and illustrations. Everything is well thought out and perfectly understandable.

One thing I disliked about this book though is the quality of the book itself. It happened to me a couple times that single pages got torn out a bit easily just by turning them and the paper used in this book makes you see every single fingerprint you ever put on this book and its pages. But that doesn't change my 5 star rating for this book, because in the end its about the content. This book for this price can be bought without any regrets. :)