HTML 4 How to: With CDROM [With Documents, Program Code, Multimedia Objects]

The authors of this book have done an excellent job at writing for the complete beginner. Clear and concise instructions provide an easy way to learn the basics. The book also dives into more complex subjects like DHTML and javascript. The CD included is not very good if you are the cut and paste type person because a lot of the code on it does not work. Besides, you learn and retain better by writing the code yourself. Don't install the CD, just explore it and get the free applications it has, such as Mapit!, an image map maker. I've had it for almost a year now and have bookmarked almost every page. I still find new stuff when I reference it.

I received my copy just a week ago although i have been doing html programming with javascript for almost 2 years now. i had some good books that helped me move on to html 4.0 though i had some unsolved problems and... walla it solved me most of them. it doesn't cover javascript,dhtml and css well enough but it is definitely inclusive about anything from within the scope of the html 4 specification :) PS better rework could have been done starting at changing to..

I used this book to learn HTML in a couple of days. It isn't really meant as a tutorial, but works very well for the purpose, as it progresses from simple to complex. I'm a programmer with 20 years experience and was looking for a book somewhere between one too simple and one that assumes you know too much. This is it. It gives just enough of the more complex topics that you understand the issues even if you need to find another reference. The text is very clear, if overly repetitive, and the examples are good. I didn't find the accompanying CD useful, however. For a book this size, it contains remarkably little "throw-away" text and as far as I could tell, no material copied from other sources as in the "... Unleashed" book series, which I dislike intensely. It's well indexed and makes a point of highlighting how various tags work with different browsers.

This was a good book. But if you have any of the other HTML # How-To books, you'll see a lot of the same code from previous books as examples. If this is your first time reading this book series, you'll like it. Only thing is the book is boring to read if you already have seen half the examples with slight modification for the HTML 4 language. Overall, HTML 4 is not very different than 3.2. It's just revised for HTML 3.2 so that dhtml/java/javascript/css work better with the language. Oh yes, this book does cover some dhtml/java/javascript/css too, but not very well, and some things that were not supported at the writing are now supported in the 4.0 browsers. If you want to learn CSS/Java/Javascript/DHTML go get a book that is designed for that language. A few chapters will not cut it.