Luckily, the folks at O'Reilly saw that need and decided to fill it. Enter the genre of pocket guides. These books are short (around 75-100 pages) reference manuals just a little taller and wider than a Palm Pilot computer (and a whole lot thinner). O'Reilly has a huge number of these inexpensive (usually around $7-10 US) books, but there are three or four that are of specific use to Web Developers.
HTML Pocket Reference
by Jennifer Niederst
I got this book and within a week nearly every page had a pencil mark on it, was dog-eared, diet-coke spilled across it, or in some way showed the love that I was showering across it. This book is a must have. It is short and concise, but it covers the HTML tags in a way that is clear and easy to understand. I especially like how each tag is defined, it's attributes explained, and you learn the browsers that it works in (from Opera, to IE, to WebTV).
It has sections on:
- HTML Tags
- Tag Groupings
- Character Entities
- A decimal to hexadecimal chart
My greatest heartache with this book right now is that I've lost it. Luckily, it's not too expensive, so if I give up looking for it, I won't be out a lot of money. Besides, this book is good enough to have two copies, one for home, and one for my pocket - you never know when you might need to know what the BDO tag is for.
