HTML and CSS: Design and Build Websites

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.

While I rarely take the time to review books, I was so impressed with this book that I wanted to offer my thoughts. It is an outstanding book. It is certainly the best book on HTML and CSS I have seen, and actually one of the better "how to" books I have read on any topic. I have been interested in creating websites for a while now, and have pursued that in fits and starts. I've used Dreamweaver, but decided I needed to learn the nuts and bolts of the HTML and CSS code. I went through a few other books but ultimately put them down because they were tedious or not practical enough. Then I stumbled on this book, and have found it to be very easily understood and readable. The book is well organized and does a great job going through the code at issue. The first half of the book covers HTML, and the second half covers CSS. The text is readable and it has lots of charts, screenshots, and diagrams that make it very easy to comprehend the subject matter. There are a variety of examples, where he will show you both the code and the result on your screen. The book also explains some background aspects of the coding and browsers, so you understand why you are doing what you are doing, but does not get bogged down with that. Another good aspect of this book is that (for the moment at least) it is current, and includes discussions of HTML5 and CSS3. If you are new to coding, and want to gain an understanding of HTML and CSS and to get up and running quickly, I think this is definitely the right book for you.

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.

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.

It’s a fantastic book for beginners learning HTML and CSS for the first time. The concepts are organized in a way where each page is simplistic yet also provides enough details and examples to grasp a good understanding. The book is separated into two main parts, the first half is HTML, while second half focuses on CSS. The only gripe I have on this book is that it is missing some of the newer and advanced features of HTML/CSS since this book is published in 2011 while being reviewed in 2025 so that’s more on me. Nevertheless still a good reference to have

I am a beginner in web development. I have already a website, which I built using Joomla framework. Latter, I decided to step forward to learn HTML & CSS. I took this decision to understand in more depth how to build a website from scratch. I am looking to be a professional in this subject rather than depending on any CMS. They are good, but you need to learn at least the basics to understand or edit your project. I have purchased this book to learn both HTML & CSS. They are the right topics to start, where I found this book to be the best tool to summarise the major aspects in these two subjects, as follow: 1. Well Organised: there are 19 chapters and 490 pages. The first nine chapters are teaching HTML, while chapters 10 to 16 focus on CSS. The last three chapters focus on HTML5 layout, process & design and practical information respectively. 2. Easy to learn: The content summarise the major tags from simple to more advanced. you can learn them by searching the web for free, but you can not find them all in one place with the correct order. This book will save a lot of your time to learn HTML & CSS. 3. Stylish Design: This book is the best book I have ever read in my life, it is colourful and well designed. The pages are premium quality. The text is organised in columns, each new tag will be in separate page with two columns. First one is the text, and the second column is a sample with code details. Finally, I really enjoy reading this book. It give me a real addition to my knowledge. It is highly recommended to read it, especially for the people who don't know HTML or any other web programming language. Thanks to WILEY and the author for their great effort. I really appreciate this achievement.

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.

Really digestible information and easy to implement. Looking forward to finishing this book to better support my business and my community.