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Clear explanations that take you step by step through some concepts that were new to me. For a person who has been doing some web designing for not that long, this book was a real eye opener. Section I and IV were good too, in that they give useful overviews of web design in general, and the mechanics of getting your site hosted, and other details that I didn't realize initially were even relevant.Well written. Section III was the least useful, for me: designing web graphics using Photoshop seemed a bit daunting, I simply use GRSites for making all the graphics which works well, but I'm sure I'll come back to this part of the book go over it slowly eventually. I liked that the chapters got to the point and took you through the material without assuming *too* much, but also without sacrificing thoroughness. Sections II (HTML) and III (CSS) were the most informative, for me.
The entire subject of XHTML & CSS is covered exactly the way a professional web developer needs. While other books assume you're an absolute beginner and painstakingly cover off topics that are way to basic; others go off tangent and describe SEO & web marketing. Most other tutorials teach you to simply "play around" and see what happens when saving images for the web. This book does it beautifully.
I had unanswered questions about the HTML Div tag for example. It's one of the few books that's written in a concise manner.It's clear that this author has worked closely with students and taught classes. She's covered off the key subjects perfectly with just the right amount of professionalism. I felt as if I was being taught in her own class. I've spent time reading through several other popular books that cover HTML & CSS and this book gives just the right level of detail. I chose this book above all others. This was the one & only book that covered off how ID & Class attributes worked when assigned to Div tags. This was the only book that explained what dithering actually does while preparing photos in photoshop.
Usually I'd just play around with the settings and have an educated guess. The visuals are perfectly spot on too. The first book that gets it absolutely right. I was absolutely clear how tags are written as an element and how they get nested together. I was struggling to grasp the difference between these two attributes. While getting my head around HTML elements had been a little confusing, the chapter here included the exact right diagram to help with the explanation.
You want to learn XHTML & CSS. Here you're given an absolute clear explanation of exactly when & where to use dithering along with all the other image optimization settings. Now when I look at my XHTML code in Dreamweaver CS4 I know exactly what's going on.I never really understood which settings were best when optimizing images for the web. These are totally separate subjects that have no place in a book about HTML. This book finally cleared this up for me.
I have checked out other HTML/CSS books, and none of them really made sense to me. The first half of the book teaches basic HTML and the second half of the book expands on that to teach you about CSS. DEFINITELY a MUST if you are a beginner web designer or need a good reference book. I have dabbled in a bit of web design before, but never knew exactly what I was doing. This book has several pictures, tutorials, tips, and recommended links that really helped me understand the fundamentals of web design. I recently took a web/interactive design course at my university, and this was the required text for the class. I just copied and pasted code from other forums and figured out what I needed to change to make things work. This is one of the only required texts I have read all the way through.
I've been designing web pages using Dreamweaver for a few years now and never bothered with the code. Right now, I am now trudging through a book to learn JavaScript.
To be fair, the subject is a bit more complex, but the way that the JavaScript book is written causes me to have to constantly look up unexplained technical terms and syntax of the code examples to figure out why they work. I am getting through the book, but not nearly as easily as I did the Learning Web Design book.
I felt the need to express how well written this book is for the beginning web designer. After reading through this book, I am not only able to simplify my web pages through code editing, but also, was able to optimize my graphics content.
I never had to do that with the Learning Web Design book. The author doesn't bog the reader down with overly complex examples of code.
I've always created my content in Photoshop and just dropped the images into the software.
But the CSS section has great examples to describe how CSS 2.x works, how block and in-line elements flow, how element types effect eachother in the flow and it has GREAT exercises and experiments to help the reader understand what is happening. To me, this book would be worth it for just the CSS Section.I have also enjoyed the section on Web Graphics and how browsers handle them. This is an excellent book on Web design and covers everything from where to start, to how the browser does request/response protocols (in a very comfortable visual way) to Web Graphics. The author also goes into the quirks between browsers and how the different browsers handle CSS differently.This book doesn't do like so many other books and just give one patterns to copy without an understanding of what is happening. Great book. However, the price of the book was worth the section on CSS.I have been beating my head against a wall trying to understand how CSS layouts actually work and how positions, floats and web page flow works. It seems very inconsistent and confusing.
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