Creating Cool Web Sites with HTML, XHTML, and CSS

Learn Web site design the easy way, from a gifted teacher! Dave Taylor is one of those rare authors that is truly gifted at teaching his subject. He makes HTML easy to understand and enjoyable. I do a little programming and recently got involved with doing some CGI stuff for a website. The CGI stuff came easy, but my site design was extremely lame. This book makes it simple to move beyond the boring and put in a little fun. My two daughters are interested in doing Web design and kept taking my book, so I bought two more copies for them. If you are just starting out, this is the place to start!

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.

I've been using a very dated GUI web design tool for years (Claris Home Page 3.0) and I needed to finally learn some current rules and the basics. This book was perfect! I'm now using pure HTML and I'm working towards XHTML and CSS. I feel like I'm on the cutting edge now. What an excellent choice I made in selecting this book out of dozens on the shelf.

I think the one thing that impressed me the most about this book was that the author didn't mention FrontPage or any other Web creation tool. He didn't even mention using Word, other than as a cautionary "Don't". No, he suggests Notepad, Mac TextEdit, or vi, pico etc. That alone is so refreshing.But there's a lot more to like. This is a complete, soup to nuts, "getting started with web pages" guide that brings you from simple HTML right through Javascript, Cascading Style Sheets, basic forms, and even validation tools. The style is practical, with useful examples that don't get bogged down trying to cover every single aspect of every single tag. Yes, you'll want other, more comprehensive references later in your learning, but this really is a fast on-ramp to that Information Superhighway we used to hear so much about.I didn't honestly expect to learn a lot from this, but I was pleasantly surprised to pick up a few pointers on things I missed in more detailed documentation. There were a few things here and there I took some exception to - things that aren't "wrong", but aren't entirely "right" either, but really these were just expository opinon: I would have explained them differently. One or two small and easily understood typo's didn't mar my enjoyment either.This is definitely a book I can strongly recommend for someone who wants to start writing their own web pages.

Target AudienceBeginning web designers or web designers who want to grow beyond single page designs.ContentsThis 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 GraphicsPart 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 WeblogsPart 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; IndexReviewIf 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.ConclusionBeginners 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.