By author:I'm very proud to announce the new, Sixth Edition of my bestselling book on
HTML, XHTML, and CSS. Its official title is HTML, XHTML, and CSS, Sixth Edition:
Visual QuickStart Guide.
My book is a clear, concise, and complete guide to
learning HTML, XHTML, and CSS which has sold over a million copies in more than
fifteen languages.
Beginners are comfortable with my direct and friendly
style and my step-by-step instructions. Explanations are short, sweet, and to
the point, and amply illustrated in current standard browsers. There's no need
to skim through pages and pages of cute examples and extra filler.
Experts
love how easy it is to quickly find the information they need. In under 500
pages, I cover HTML, XHTML, and CSS 2 completely but succinctly. Each
topic is demonstrated with a real-life example (available in the book as well as
on this Web site), and is a cinch to find thanks to the excellent index.
The
new Sixth Edition has been completely overhauled to take into account current
design practices: using standards-based code to create liquid layouts that are
broadly accessible--not only to a multitude of browsers on various platforms
with a variety of monitors, but also to handhelds and other mobile devices, to
foreign audiences, and to the disabled.
In particular, the book uses brand
new CSS examples to illustrate modern layout design with CSS, covers using XHTML
and CSS for displaying pages for mobile devices, shows how to format forms with
CSS and how to process them with PHP, describes how to embed audio and video on
Web sites in a standards-compliant way, and then how to syndicate that content
and create a podcast by writing RSS feeds.
In addition, the Sixth Edition is
in full color, with larger screenshots that focus on the code in question and
larger captions that describe what is going on there. I think you'll find the
book much clearer overall.
The book's extremely useful charts and tables are
back in force, including the full-color color chart, tables of both XHTML and
CSS, a complete list of the entity references for special symbols and
characters, and a table of hexadecimal values.
If you want to look up the syntax of a particular property Core CSS works quite well. But it's not much use if you're trying to achieve a particular result — two equal-height columns on a page, say — or want to understand the more complex behaviours of properties — negative margins are not covered at all, for example. The big problem with Core CSS, however, is that it's way too verbose, with a lot of redundancy. Code samples and screenshots are nice, but we don't need the HTML for complete pages or screenshots for every single property.
The presentation of browser compatibility information is particularly unhelpfully expansive, with every property followed by a bullet list listing "safe", "unsafe", or "partial" for fifteen browsers. So instead of simply describing the text-shadow property as "not safe in any browser", we get the full list of fifteen. And instead of describing margin-bottom as "unsafe in IE 3.0 and only partially supported in Netscape 4", again there's the full list — repeated, identically, for margin-top, margin-left, and margin-right! This is not just wasteful of space, but actually makes it harder to see the important information.
Another egregious example is the table of contents, where there's a lone "Browser Compatibility" sub-entry for nearly every section. It's almost as if Core CSS has been deliberately padded out so as to be as long as possible. It is not unusable as it is, but it could have been a much more useful book of half if not a third the length; that would also have made it more comfortable to pick up and handle.
24 April 2004
Download here:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ZV57OGAV
