Learning Web Design: A Beginner's Guide to (X)HTML, StyleSheets, and Web Graphics,   ISBN:9780596527525

Customer Rating: 

"I buy this book as an introduction to web design, I wanted to learn HTML, CSS, and a well-rounded knowledge about the subject. And the book provides that, plus a solid base of what is a good and accessible web site, setting your mind in a neat and professional style with good practices.
It has a lot of references to find help, knowledge and resources in the web. It is very easy to follow, and it presents good examples and practice exercises.
It is not an advanced book, but when you finish it, you will be ready to do many things and continue to learn by your own with the resources it mentions.
For me it was a solid start point."

Customer Rating: 

For a person who has been doing some web designing for not that long, this book was a real eye opener. 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. Clear explanations that take you step by step through some concepts that were new to me. 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. 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!

Customer Rating: 

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. You want to learn XHTML & CSS? This book does it beautifully. 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. These are totally separate subjects that have no place in a book about HTML. I had unanswered questions about the HTML Div tag for example. This was the one & only book that covered off how ID & Class attributes worked when assigned to Div tags. I was struggling to grasp the difference between these two attributes. This book finally cleared this up for me. 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. Usually I'd just play around with the settings and have an educated guess. This was the only book that explained what dithering actually does while preparing photos in photoshop. Most other tutorials teach you to simply "play around" and see what happens when saving images for the web. Here you're given an absolute clear explanation of exactly when & where to use dithering along with all the other image optimization settings. The entire subject of XHTML & CSS is covered exactly the way a professional web developer needs. The visuals are perfectly spot on too. 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. I was absolutely clear how tags are written as an element and how they get nested together. 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. The first book that gets it absolutely right!

Customer Rating: 

I have dabbled in a bit of web design before, but never knew exactly what I was doing. I just copied and pasted code from other forums and figured out what I needed to change to make things work. I recently took a web/interactive design course at my university, and this was the required text for the class. This is one of the only required texts I have read all the way through. 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 checked out other HTML/CSS books, and none of them really made sense to me. This book has several pictures, tutorials, tips, and recommended links that really helped me understand the fundamentals of web design.

Customer Rating: 

I felt the need to express how well written this book is for the beginning web designer. The author doesn't bog the reader down with overly complex examples of code. I've been designing web pages using Dreamweaver for a few years now and never bothered with the code. I've always created my content in Photoshop and just dropped the images into the software. 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.
Right now, I am now trudging through a book to learn JavaScript. I am getting through the book, but not nearly as easily as I did the Learning Web Design book. 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 never had to do that with the Learning Web Design book.