Book Club

I really enjoyed this book. It is so much more that just pages with lists of tags. The authors go into detail about the tags and their usage. I think the book is also a great tutorial, not just a reference guide. The authors’ writing style is fun and easy to read.

The chapter on Cascading Style Sheets provides a good overview of the CSS2 standard. At 77 pages, this chapter gives readers plenty of information on how to get started using CSS in their pages. The end of the chapter lists some pros and cons of using the different types of style sheets: inline, external and document-level.

If you need help on setting up forms, Chapter 9 provides plenty of information. The authors explain all aspects of creating forms, and give lots of coding examples. They even include a brief introduction to creating a server-side application to process the forms, although they do recommend that copying and modifying some existing code for your own use is easier than writing a forms application from scratch.

The book includes a couple of appendices: HTML Quick Reference and CSS Properties Quick Reference. The information in these two sections is listed alphabetically. Also included with the book is a tear-out HTML/XHTML Quick Reference card. Here the tags are listed by function, so if you a looking for a specific tag attribute, this is a quick way to find it.

If you want to know more about HTML/XHTML and the web pages you create, you need to get a copy of “HTML & XHMTL: The Definitive Guide”.

Review by: Kathy Senecal
November 5, 2004