Spring Into HTML and CSS

Spring Into HTML and CSS
by Molly E. Holzschlag
ISBN: 0-13-185586
List Price: $29.99
Amazon Price: $19.79
To see an excerpt of Chapter 8 click here

I have been building web pages for over 10 years now, and I code all of them in HTML, so I considered myself an HTML Expert, and thought I would just skim through the HTML section, to get to the CSS section which I really wanted to learn. I was a little surprised that they started off with the doctype statement, because most books delay that to the very end, but I understood why Molly started off with it on page 2. I still felt I knew everything, and would just be skimming the first half of the book, but it did not exactly work out that way, because I kept running across HTML tags I had never heard of before. Tags that were new to me included Definition List - DL, DT, DD (page 21), tabindex (pages 23, 25), I never knew that the # in Intrapage Linking [which I thought of as anchor element] (page 26) was called the octothorpe, and I never heard of table captions (page 56), table summary (page 57), table col element (page 63) or colgroup (page 65).

Finding so many tags I never had used before (I had seen the definition list tags in Netscape's bookmark list) I had to go through the HTML part page by page, and I must admit that had I been new to HTML, Molly Holzschlag's book is the one I would have wanted to use to learn it. This "expert" even learned a few things about tags I had been using for many many years. It reminded me of the definition of the word expert. It is a combination of "ex", which is a has-been, and "spurt" which is a drip that has been placed under extreme pressure.

I finally made it to the CSS section, and since most of it was new to me, it took me even longer to get through that section, but I must admit that Molly did as good a job with CSS as she did with HTML.

When I first learned HTML I did it by modifying the code of an existing website I wanted mine to look like, checking each HTML tag in Kevin Werbach's Bare Bones Guide to HTML to see what they meant, and changing the words between the HTML tags to the words I wanted my page to say, and switching back and forth between text editor and browser frequently to see how I was doing. And when I first started my blog I did something similar with the BlogSpot template code, saving it to the HD and making minor changes, and switching back and forth to a browser to see the effect of my changes. I am now experimenting with a WordPress blog, but thanks to Molly Holzschlag's Spring Into HTML and CSS I suspect I will be able to customize a template for it a lot faster and easier.

Appendix A (pages 227-257) is a list of all XHTML 1.0 tags, and Appendix B (pages 259-298) is a reference source for CSS 2.1 selectors and properties.

I highly recommend Molly Holzschlag's Spring Into HTML and CSS.