The Bottom Line
For the price, you won't find a more comprehensive book on HTML. This book excerpts from high-quality HTML books, to create a unified whole. This book is a good buy for intermediate web developers.
Pros
- Very dense, lots of material
- Strong reference information
- Good price
Cons
- May be overwhelming to beginners
- Tags listed in upper-case (invalid XHTML)
Description
- Section one introduces HTML. It covers Web design, HTML vs. XHTML and creating an HTML document.
- Section one also covers how to publish a document and resons for creating a usable site.
- Section two delves deeper into the planning and design of a Web page, including frames and layout.
- Section two covers more advanced HTML techniques used for designing a Web site.
- Section three gets into the really advanced items, like optimization, and multimedia.
- Section three moves past HTML into style sheets and DHTML.
- Section four looks at XML and how it impacts HTML, including XHTML.
- Section five is the last third of the book, and it makes up a huge reference section.
- The HTML reference covers all the HTML tags, with just a minor issue of capitalization.
- The CSS reference doesn't cover CSS2 in depth, but it does include CSS1 properties and usage.
Guide Review - HTML Complete from Sybex Inc.
With a list price of around $25US this book would seem to be an underdog competitor for most computer manuals, but don't let the price fool you. This book is a very hefty 920 pages long with excerpts from authors well known in the Web design field. It is not a book for people just wanting a taste of Web design. But for those developers who want to get more out of their Web pages, but don't want to spend a lot of money, this book is just the thing. As a compilation, I was expecting a choppier, disjointed book, but it's not. The flow is smooth throughout and you can find what you need quickly. For the budget conscious developer, this book is all you need to design Web pages.
