Publication Date:April 28, 2008 Availability:Usually ships in 1-2 business days Condition:Brand new book. Shipped from our NYC store. Slight Shelf wear to cover. Pages are clean and unmarked.
Product Description Beginning Web Programming with HTML, XHTML, and CSS 2nd Edition
Offering a new approach to a familiar topic, this book teaches you how to create pages for the web as it exists today—and how it will be for the foreseeable future. The time for using only HTML coding to write a web page is gone. As the Web has advanced, so have the technologies you need to learn in order to create effective and attractive web pages. This beginning guide reviews HTML and also introduces you to using XHTML for the structure of a web page and cascading style sheets (CSS) for controlling how a document should appear on a web page.
Updated with modern examples, the book explores the evolution of web browsers and how they reflect the way web pages have developed. You'll learn how to take advantage of the latest features of browsers while still making sure that your pages still work in older, but popular, browsers. In addition, you'll discover how to write web pages for the many devices that are able to access the web. By incorporating usability and accessibility, you'll be able to write professional-looking and well-coded web pages that use the latest technologies.
What you will learn from this book
The different elements and attributes that make up HTML and XHTML and how to use them to write web pages
Ways to use CSS to make your pages attractive and easy to use
The basics of JavaScript so you can add interactivity to your web pages
How to put your site on the Internet, find an audience for it, and get search engines to recognize it
Who this book is for This book is for anyone who wants to create web pages or for those who want to improve their web-design skill level. No prior programming or web coding knowledge is assumed.
Wrox Beginning guides are crafted to make learning programming languages and technologies easier than you think, providing a structured, tutorial format that will guide you through all the techniques involved.
Download Description What is this book about?
Beginning Web Programming with HTML, XHTML, and CSS teaches you how to write Web pages using HTML, XHTML, and CSS. It follows standards-based principles, but also teaches readers ways around problems they are likely to face using (X)HTML.
While XHTML is the "current" standard, the book still covers HTML because many people do not yet understand that XHTML is the official successor to HTML, and many readers will still stick with HTML for backward compatibility and simpler/informal Web pages that don't require XHTML compliance.
The book teaches basic principles of usability and accessibility along the way, to get users into the mode of developing Web pages that will be available to as many viewers as possible from the start. The book also covers the most commonly used programming/scripting language — JavaScript — and provides readers with a roadmap of other Web technologies to learn after mastering this book to add more functionality to their sites.
Great teaching bookDecember 11, 2007 Great introduction to front-end web programming using XHTML and CSS. It even gets into the nitty-gritty of SEO strategies, rating your site for child access, testing methods, and accessibility for the visually impaired. Also provides a good, although brief intro to JavaScript, database driven websites, and programming for mobile devices.
Yes there is a lot of repetition and a bit of wandering back and forth across subjects, and yes it can be annoying. But most books in this genre are guilty of that. This one is no better nor worse than the others. Nice reference and appendix. Recommended.
Hard to followJune 3, 2007 6 out of 7 found this review helpful
I have gone from being frustrated with this title to disliking it intensely. I would suggest alternate materials such as the O'Reilly publication, "HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide."
First, "BWP w/HTML, XHTML, and CSS" is dated. Its publication date is 2004. This text often complains that features "are not supported by browsers" that have since been updated. There are more current materials published within the last year. (And on the subject of browsers, I have not found a single mention of Mozilla, Safari, or Opera in this book).
Second, the author's presentation is often difficult to follow. Concedely it is a difficult subject to organize when there are "live" tags, "deprecated" tags, the ongoing effort to separate stylistic elements into CSS, and different browswers' idiosyncracies with which to deal. Duckett, however, is next to hopeless in separating these subjects.
Most critical is the fact that this book is a very unhappy blend between an introductory tutorial and a reference "bible." Duckett will introduce a basic concept -- say, "tables" and will then load up on all of the attributes that the element might take. Learning the key ideas gets lost in the process. The book often leads off into asides and references to more advanced topics that will easily lose the initiate. It is no coincidence that several of the reviews here use the word "intermediate" in connection with this text.
The author does not seem to understand the principle that individuals learn by working from the "known" step-by-step to the "unknown." Instead, he seems to rely upon the idea that "if I throw everything at them in a random fashion, they'll figure out a good amount of it."
As an example of its "random walk" approach, Chapter 4 first provides a sound introduction into the use of colors and making references to images. The closing section of the chapter, however, branches off into a discussion of the
Great intro for novice programmerApril 20, 2007 I have only dabbled in programming before, mainly in C#. I am well-pleased with this book.
PRO: 1. This book was a solid introduction to HTML and XHTML. What impressed me most is that the author gives you the fundamentals of the HTML language, and also teaches you modern Web methods using CSS. 2. Follows a logical order, putting you into practice from the first chapter. 3. Good primer for [...]and general web development for the new programmer. In fact, if you are interested in XML, I would study this book first, and then move on to XML. By the end of the book, you will have mastered many concepts of XML, and will have learned HTML in the process.
CON: It could have used a better scheme of highlighting points, bulleting, etc. But the dedicated reader will overcome this small failure.
Serves it's purpose.....I like itMarch 6, 2007 4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I had an interest in web development years ago when I invested some time going through free html tutorials online. I also spent some money on a couple of books on html as well as JavaScript, but never finished what I started. About a month ago I purchased this book to get my feet wet again, and I have to say that this book served its purpose.
The title does say "Beginning Web Programming..." and the material definitely fit the title. Having finished reading the XHTML and the CSS portion of this book I feel very comfortable in writing XHTML documents. It also served as a handy, although heavy, reference during my practice coding sessions.
The CSS portion of this book took up two chapters. It served as a great introduction to CSS and it left me with enough know how to write simple stylesheets. As I tried to write more complicated stylesheet like defining rules for layouts using
, I found myself struggling and decided to purchase a more advanced book on CSS.
There are two chapters devoted to JavaScript on this book. From reading the titles of those two chapters I am under the impression that it will give you enough knowledge to download pre-written JavaScripts online and be able to effectively implement it on a webpage. I complete skipped these chapters as I had purchased a separate book on this subject.
All in all, this is a good book for beginners who want to gain the fundamental knowledge about building a website. If you want to become a professional this book serves as a good starting point, as it will equip you with the fundamentals and lead you to your next step in your studies to become a professional Web Developer.
Excruciatingly verboseMay 8, 2006 8 out of 15 found this review helpful
This will absolutely be the last Wrox book I bought. The annoying, condescending author's photo on the cover aside, this book is extremely verbose, to the point of distracting the reader from really learning anything. For example, it seems on every other page the author feels compelled to tell you that XHTML is just the successor of HTML (he must of thought of the typical reader as totally dumb) and he has a God-given talent of saying so in far more words than necessary each time. Another example: when he gives you some sample code, he would do it step-by-step, and each step would repeat teh same code that was already printed before! What's more, in teh "how it works" recap section, he would then re-print the entire code segment! This book weighs in at over 600 pages, but the contents could easily have fit on half that. Talking about killing trees.
The content quality itself is also quite lacking. The book is neither a tutorial nor a reference, but seems stuck trying to be both. For example, when a HTML element is introduced, say
