Sams Teach Yourself HTML and CSS In 24 Hours 107
r3lody writes "Sams Teach Yourself HTML and CSS in 24 Hours 8th edition, by Julie C. Meloni and Michael Morrison, provides the beginning and intermediate web designer with the tools needed to create standards-based web sites. The major focus of the book is XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2, but HTML 5 and some XHTML 1.0 are discussed. Overall, the presentation and content are very good. One small minus was that the publisher's site did not include downloadable examples from the book. I also found no errata until the latter parts of the book. Published in December of 2009, the 8th edition provides reasonably current information." Read on for Ray's review.
Each "hour" of the book includes a "What You'll Learn in this Hour" section at the beginning, and Q&A, Quiz and Exercises sections at the end. Most chapters also include a "Try It Yourself" section, indicating what you should be accomplishing with your own web site. The examples have color coding for the various tags, comments, etc., and the book's examples work with a number of browsers. Specifically, Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera browsers were used to test the examples. If you use the coding standards espoused in the book, your web pages should appear properly formatted across most computers. Handheld browsers are only covered briefly, in the section discussing media-specific style sheets.
| Sams Teach Yourself HTML and CSS in 24 Hours (8th edition) | |
| author | Julie C. Meloni and Michael Morrison |
| pages | 456 |
| publisher | Sams |
| rating | 8/10 |
| reviewer | Ray Lodato |
| ISBN | 0672330970 |
| summary | A very useful text on web page coding using XHTML and CSS. |
Overall, the book is divided into five parts: Getting Started on the Web, Building Blocks of Practical Web Design, Advanced Web Page Design with CSS, Advanced Web Site Functionality and Management, and Appendixes.
Part I: Getting Started on the Web provides the customary introductory material, suitable for beginning users. After describing the seemingly obligatory "history of the web", the first hour concludes with discussions of how to choose a web hosting provider – a topic rarely covered in the books I've read. The second hour teaches how to get web pages uploaded to a web server using FTP, and how to distribute content in a file-based structure without a server. The next two hours then cover the basics of XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2. For both XHTML and CSS, very clear instructions on how to validate your coding help insure that your pages follow the standards.
The next 9 chapters comprise Part II: (Building Blocks of Practical Web Design). This part goes into detail regarding web page coding. Starting with text alignment using paragraph tags and lists, the book has a good collection of text formatting tips using CSS as the preferred style methodology. Tables and links are covered in the next two chapters at a pretty standard level. I found the chapter on using color had a lot of good information, but I believe a beginning user would find it somewhat confusing – especially when hexadecimal notation is introduced.
The next three chapters of this part of the book cover images and multimedia. I liked the focus on getting the right sizing for photos and banners, and the tutorial on how to place the images on the web page (including wrapping text, image maps, and clickable images). I was disappointed in the limited coverage of tiling and GIF animation. The multimedia chapter was a pleasant addition – one I have rarely seen in web design texts. The discussion was tilted toward Microsoft technology, so my testing worked properly only under Internet Explorer at first, however I finally managed to get Firefox to deal with the embedded object. Some information was given for embedding YouTube links, also. I would have liked to have seen more information on the parameters for the WMP object coding. The last chapter in Part II covers frames – both framesets and iframes – with only basic information.
Advanced Web Page Design with CSS is the main topic of Part III. These six chapters dig into the important aspects of CSS alignment. One chapter focuses entirely on margins, padding, alignment and floating, and provides a nice introduction to the full discussion of the CSS box model in the next chapter. Reformatting lists was the principal target of the next chapter, leading to a discussion of navigation bars (horizontal and vertical) in the chapter after that. This is where I started picking up on some irregularities that escaped a review. For example, even though this was supposed to be standard XHTML, I noticed some list item ending tags missing from the examples. Granted, browsers still display the list properly, but this should have been caught before printing.
The last two chapters in this part cover modifying text display using mouse actions, and fixed versus liquid layouts. I liked the mouse techniques to modify a displayed image based on which thumbnail image the mouse is over. It's a simple little method that looks very nice on the page. The liquid layout chapter gave me some problems at first. My attempts didn't work the same under different browsers at first, but when I went back over them while writing the review, they worked just fine. I'm still at a loss to understand what was wrong, so I suspect those starting out may have a similar experience.
The final major part, Advanced Web Site Functionality and Management, wraps up some miscellaneous issues. First, they cover how to create a modified CSS profile to make the web page more print-friendly. The next chapter provides an introduction to JavaScript. Unfortunately, this is where I found some more non-standard XHTML code. Web-based forms are covered only at a high-level in hour 22. The authors do provide examples of each type of form field, with CSS code to neaten up the page, but it appears to be a very cursory handling of the topic.
The final two hours go over the basics of keeping your web site organized, and how to publicize the site on major search engines. The book wraps up with a final part for the two appendixes, containing useful links to further information and a general XHTML and CSS reference.
Teach Yourself HTML and CSS in 24 Hours appears to be a properly authoritative text that would help you create a standards-based web site. Like most texts of this type, it does not reference web design software such as DreamWeaver. Rather, it addresses understanding exactly what code standards-based browsers will handle, and how you can manipulate them to create exactly what you want. The two main disappointments with the book are the obvious errors in the later chapters, and the lack of downloadable examples from the publisher's web site. That said, the content is so worthwhile, I rated it an 8 out of 10.
You can purchase Sams Teach Yourself HTML and CSS in 24 Hours (8th edition) from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Only 24 hours? (Score:5, Informative)
More likely, they mean "Teach yourself HTML/CSS in 24 1 hour lessons" or something like that. I found I was able to learn the basics of HTML & CSS in about an 8 hour day. The problem is the moving target HTML has become over the years, though even that is a minor adjustment. I think this type of books is probably o.k. for most people, but it would be better if they used a free resource like W3 School's free tutorials [w3schools.com].
Re:Only 24 hours? (Score:5, Informative)
The hard part of CSS was keeping track of, in exactly which manner, IE6 fucked it up. .gif after-life for bad browsers, CSS just got a whole lot easier.
Now that the holy Google has given us all permission to drop IE6, into flaming animated
http://www.quirksmode.org/css/contents.html [quirksmode.org]
Misinfromation in 1st Chapter (Score:5, Informative)
I found this while previewing the book on Amazon's website: "Suppose you want to do a Google search, so you dutifully type http://www.google.com in the address bar"..."Your web browser sends a request for the index.html file located at the http://www.google.com/ address"
While it's not the end of the world, it certainly is an error that will misguide a beginner on how traffic is exchanged between a browsing client and the web server. The web browser does not assume index.html. That is the job of the web server to assign a default document whether its index.html, default.htm, index.php, or yourmama.html.
X in 24 hours (Score:5, Informative)
Doesn't everyone know that X in 24 hours books neither teach you X, nor do it in 24 hours? They're super low-end guides generally that contain outdated information that could just as easily have been gleaned from tutorials. Meh.
I can't believe Slashdot ran an ad^H^H^H^H review of this book.
Re:Misinfromation in 1st Chapter (Score:5, Informative)
That is the job of the web server to assign a default document whether its index.html, default.htm, index.php, or yourmama.html
I sent a request for yourmama.html last night, and it was 200 OK.
Re:Only 24 hours? (Score:4, Informative)
That's because inline-block was originally a proprietary Internet Explorer property. It was added to CSS 2.1 years later, at which point the other browsers implemented it.
Re:Misinfromation in 1st Chapter (Score:5, Informative)
+1 funny mods don't give karma points to the author. To work around this, the moderators decide to
- mod moderately funny jokes as funny
- mod great jokes as informative or insightful
The practice is widespread and metamods generally agree with it (I think, at least I still get mod points...).
Julie C. Meloni-Department of English-Wash. St. (Score:1, Informative)
Meloni is an English teacher!
Re:Only 24 hours? (Score:5, Informative)
You young folk don't know how good you've got it. I cut my teeth doing all-nighters at the campus computer center, that being the only way to get decent turnaround on the 360 mainframe. (Don't know what I'm talking about? Google "batch processing" and "IBM cards".) With that training, I was able to pull all-nighters well into my 40s. Though it wasn't nearly as much fun by then — everybody else was gone by 6, the wimps.
The w3schools.com is very impressive. Not only do they provide a huge amount of well-written content, they have these cool web apps that let you fiddle with code and see the results immediately. I've never worked through any of their tutorials, but when I google for information on some HTML or CSS feature, I end up on w3schools.com about 75% of the time. That should tell you something.
W3.org is also a valuable resource. They are, after all, the authoritative source for HTML, CSS, and lots of other web technologies. Two pitfalls: their target audience is implementers and standards wonks, not web developers; and you have to watch out for features that never got implemented.
Despite these issues, it's really a good idea to write web code that targets the W3C specs rather than specific browsers. That way you'll have web pages that work on most browsers and don't break whenever somebody tinkers with Gecko or Trident.
Two minor corrections... (Score:3, Informative)