Product Description

Need to learn HTML fast? This best-selling reference's visual format and step-by-step, task-based instructions will have you up and running with HTML in no time. In this completely updated edition of our best-selling guide to HTML, Web expert and best-selling author Elizabeth Castro uses crystal-clear instructions and friendly prose to introduce you to all of today's HTML and XHTML essentials. You’ll learn how to design, structure, and format your Web site. You'll create and use images, links, styles, lists, tables, frames, and forms, and you'll add sound and movies to your site. Finally, you will test and debug your site, and publish it to the Web. Along the way, you'll find extensive coverage of CSS techniques, current browsers (Opera, Safari, Firefox), creating pages for the mobile Web, and more.

Visual QuickStart Guide--the quick and easy way to learn!

• Easy visual approach uses pictures to guide you through HTML and show you what to do.
• Concise steps and explanations get you up and running in no time.
• Page for page, the best content and value around.
• Companion Web site at www.cookwood.com/html offers examples, a lively question-and-answer area, updates, and more.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9032 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 456 pages

From the Back Cover
As both the Web and the browsers used to navigate it mature, work-arounds that compensate for the myriad factors that affect Web page appearance no longer cut it. Users expect Web pages to look beautiful regardless--and with the Fifth Edition of this popular Visual QuickStart Guide, you can make your Web pages comply. By following the generously illustrated, step-by-step instructions that are the hallmark of the Visual QuickStart series, you'll create beautiful code that works consistently across browser versions and platforms (including hand-held devices and cell phones) in no time.

This updated edition includes a new section on foreign-language and multilingual Web sites as well as ample coverage on how the use of HTML is changing. What hasn't changed, however, is the book's popular format: Task-oriented, step-by-step instruction that builds on your growing knowledge. Info-packed appendixes, a comprehensive index, and plenty of screen shots and code examples make HTML for the World Wide Web, Fifth Edition, with XHTML and CSS: Visual QuickStart Guide a must-have reference. Whether you're just getting your feet wet (no prior HTML knowledge is required) or design Web sites for a living, you'll turn to this best-selling guide again and again for answers to all of your HTML-related questions.

About the Author
Elizabeth Castro has written all five best-selling editions of HTML for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide. She is also author of Perl and CGI for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide and XML for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide—both best-sellers! Liz was the technical editor for Peachpit’s The Macintosh Bible, Fifth Edition, and she founded Pagina Uno, a publishing house in Barcelona, Spain.

Customer Reviews

Best Web Comprehensive Book Ever!
Let me say just that I love "Visual Quickstart Guide" books. They have lots of useful examples in different colors. I don't know what I'd do without "Visual Quickstart Guide" books... I'd be probably cleaning someone's house without them.

I bought this book (456 pages) to teach myself CSS because I'm very much familiar with HTML/XHTML. The book had an excellent CSS section as well as good information of multimedia, mobile, RSS, SEO(Search Engine Optimization) and debugging. It wasn't painful to read this book unlike other books I've read (which are too long to list here).

Probably still the best out there, but...
...someone without any experience of HTML or web design might find this successor to Castro's HTML 4 overwhelming. I'm teaching an introduction to web design course & using it as a textbook, but have decided to skip over Chapter 1 because of the barrage of jargon...not a good way to ease students into the subject! Does a complete novice need to know in Chapter 1 the distinctions between inherited CSS styles, selectors, specificity, class, id, etc., when CSS aren't even dealt with until Chapter 8?

"HTML 4" was easier to get into & better-paced, I think. However, that said, this is probably the best book available for getting a grip on XHTML & CSS, generally clear and thorough.

Learned html from scratch, fast!
I knew nothing about html or css when I started. I found this "Visual QuickStart Guide" at a specialty reference bookstore in Australia. I spent 45min. that day, thumbing through beginner's web design books and nothing else even came close to this book for clarity and relevance. So off I went with my "QuickStart Guide" and for 2 weeks, I spent evenings & weekends reading this book and trying out code on my computer. Then voila! I had a website! Well... it worked well in different browsers on my PC but it took another 2 weeks to choose a host and get it all online. Still, that was pretty quick. If you haven't programmed at all before, it will probably take a little longer to get going (My previous experience: I did programming in c++ at university, years ago.) but I honestly don't think you'll find a better book for getting started. Once in a while I found a term in the book that wasn't super well explained. I was always able to figure out what it meant though, because the examples & such are so clear.