HTML Books Book Reviews

HTML is not hard, but it is detailed. This page reviews several comprehensive and up-to-date HTML reference books.

Cascading Style Sheets, Second Edition: Designing for the Web by Hakon Wium Lie, Bert Bos, Robert Cailliau: The authors of this book created the CSS standard. This discussion is comprehensive and detailed. The book does not assume you know HTML but it is better if you are comfortable with HTML basics. Review added January 2001.; If you read this book, also read about the reality of CSS in existing browsers. The Fear of Style Sheets series at the A List Apart site is excellent.
HTML and XHTML: The Definitive Guide from O’Reilly & Associates: This book is comprehensive, well organized, and well written. This is the book I reach for first. However, if you have no experience with HTML, you may find that it does not have enough screen shots. Review added February 2000. Updated May 2001
HTML: The Complete Reference by Thomas A. Powell: An HTML encyclopedia of sorts, this book is as good as the O’Reilly book and includes more screen shots. Review added February 2000.
HTML 4 for Dummies by Ed Tittel and Natanya Pitts: If you like the Dummies books, this is a good first HTML book. The discussion is clear and not intimidating, and the technical content is accurate and detailed enough. Review added February 2000.

The HTML markup language is simple to learn and use. So why is the Web full of so many ugly and hard-to-use sites? Design is more important than the details of HTML markup. See the Web Design Book Reviews page for recommended readings.

You can read the HTML 4.01 Specification on the World Wide Web Consortium Web site. Fair warning: Internet standards are written in a specialized technical language that can be difficult to read until you become used to it. I prefer to use an HTML book than look information up in the standards. If you want the standards, a PDF version is available at the Download Standards page. Here is a direct link for the download (2.9 MB).

Read a great book lately? Send an email to dpadams@island-data.com.

HTML Books Book Reviews

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