Beginning Web Programming with HTML, XHTML, and CSS

Book Rank: 17[XHTML] 21[CSS]
Paperback: 768 pages
Publisher: Wrox; 2 edition (April 28, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0470259310
ISBN-13: 978-0470259313
Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 1.6 inches







Offering a new approach to a familiar topic, this book teaches you how to create pages for the web as it exists today—and how it will be for the foreseeable future. The time for using only HTML coding to write a web page is gone. As the Web has advanced, so have the technologies you need to learn in order to create effective and attractive web pages. This beginning guide reviews HTML and also introduces you to using XHTML for the structure of a web page and cascading style sheets (CSS) for controlling how a document should appear on a web page.

Updated with modern examples, the book explores the evolution of web browsers and how they reflect the way web pages have developed. You'll learn how to take advantage of the latest features of browsers while still making sure that your pages still work in older, but popular, browsers. In addition, you'll discover how to write web pages for the many devices that are able to access the web. By incorporating usability and accessibility, you'll be able to write professional-looking and well-coded web pages that use the latest technologies.

The book starts at the entry-level of web development and through the course of the book adds to your knowledge base with each proceeding chapter. Chapters go over important features, as well as defunct features you might run into if your looking at the source code of someone else's site and some features that have no function now, but are expected to be useful for the next version of web browsers. For the most part, the information is good though from time to time you will get descriptions that would only make sense if you had played around with web development before.

The book also has the annoying habit of mentioning a feature and then saying "But you'll learn all about that in chapter " which becomes annoying after you've read this and similiar lines for the 20th time. There are also some exercises where you'll find yourself using features the book hasn't gone over yet, but fortunately, it tends to talk about it a little later in the same chapter.

The Appendices in the back do a reasonably good job at grouping everything you've learned for quick access, but often forgets to provide decent details so if you don't remember certain things about an XHTML element for example, you'll find yourself having to flip through the index and rereading that section of the book.

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