Rating: 
Summary: A Valuable Resource
Review: I am a professional graphic designer, and have been buying the Visual Quickstart Guide books to learn programs since I was first assigned one in a college design class 7 years ago. Since then, I have used one these books to learn every program I have needed (quark, photoshop, dreamweaver, director, flash...), and still reference them continuosly. I highly recommend every one in the series, because of the straightforward way the information is organized and presented. You can read them straight through, or easily look up questions along the way. They have become an extrememly valuable resource, especially in web design.This book, HTML for the world wide web, is no exception. I recently took an online course through Macromedia, and was left confused. This book is so easy to understand, and includes essentials to web development such as XHTML, CSS and CGI. And the price is great!!
Rating:
Summary: Most Excellent!
Review: This book has all of the CSS information that I've been looking for for the past couple of years, plus the added bonus of explaining what exactly XHTML is and how it differs from HTML. Everything is explained and demonstrated in a way that makes sense the first time, without having to test and/or re-read the text. I have already begun advising my fellow web developers to get a copy of this book for themselves.
Rating:
Summary: Simple, but....you have to design the web site
Review: The book by Elizabeth Castro, HTML 5 with XHTML $ CSS is as easy as it gets. It explains the basics of web design with pictures, examples while giving her prospective on a number of issues concerning the www.
The book helped me to make my web pages more effective and easy to navigate, it solved a number of problems that my pages had.
The book is also very entertaining unlike most books of this sort that bore you with lengthy explanations. If you are serious about web design, you need this book, but the book does not make you a professional web designer, you have to come up with the way a web is designed, pictures to be used, colors, font size, and things like this.
I gave the book five stars because I went to Mrs. Castro website and I got the feeling that she built a website to give useful information not to amuse the reader with her abilities to build a cutting edge web page. That's the message most pro designers forget, "We're after people, not after technology".
Mrs. Castro explains HTML rules in a very humble way, with humor and effectiveness.
Two thumbs up!
Rating:
Summary: One of the best of its type
Review: Usually skeptical about books promising to teach technical subjects "the quick and easy way," this one seemed different so I decided to take a chance. Very glad I did. Though I have been using Dreamweaver to design and manage several websites for about five years, there were always some things that never looked or worked quite right, especially in browsers other than Internet Explorer. I got home from the bookstore, sat down in front of the computer, and checked the index in Ms. Castro's book. Five minutes later, first problem solved! Even with powerful software like Dreamweaver, it's important to understand basic HTML code and behavior. Being able to tweak the code oneself is the most reliable way to ensure your site runs and looks the way you want it to. This is where Castro's book really shines, even for quasi-technophobes like me. The instructions are remarkably clear and are really step-by-step, sometimes keystroke by keystroke. The sidebar examples are well done and very useful; (X)HTML conventions are explained in layperson-friendly language. And somehow Ms. Castro manages to inject some personality and liveliness into what can sometimes be so deadly dull. For anyone who hasn't taken a course in (X)HTML or otherwise worked with it extensively, this will be a highly useful guide.
Rating:
Summary: Good Choice
Review: When I went looking for books on CSS, I first passed on this book and picked up one of those "24 hour" books. By the next day I went looking again and this time I picked it up. Glad I did. I learned a lot on (X)HTML AND CSS! Plenty of pictures and examples, beginning to end. The color, HTML Elements and CSS Property charts are useful tools for this personal web designer. And the Tips help is great. If you're a pro maybe this is too basic. But for a beginner or part-time web designer, it's great. Highly recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: Good book, although author's web site stinks
Review: This book lays down easy to follow examples, and specifies what CSS and (X)HTML tags will and won't work in older browers. The naming of elements and classes could use a little more emphasis. It's there, but you can't run by fast. I would have given this book Five Stars but the author's companion website is so poorly designed and formatted that you can barely read it. It's so bad that it is a credibility issue to the book. Standing on its own, the book is excellent.
Rating:
Summary: Bravo Castro!
Review: I have owned every one of the HTML for the world wide web books she's written and like the others, this one is better than all the books before. As the web moves more toward CSS, Castro focuses on helping readers get a good solid understanding of how to utilize CSS features but doesn't leave anyone behind. Why do I like this book and the rest of the series so much? When I'm writing code, I don't have time to read lots of stuff to understand how to do what I need to have done. Castro's books are very to-the-point teaching users what's needed to get the job done now. Other reviewers have given her a 4/5 for not covering things as well as possible, but in my view, this is still an excellent reference. I keep this book along with others handy any time I'm writing PHP, HTML, CSS, or Perl. It's been worn quite well as well as the rest of her HTML books in my library. I actually teach HTML from this book and my students rave about it too.
Rating:
Summary: Great for Working with Transitional XHTML and CSS
Review: Prior to reading this book I was HTML-proficient, but minimally familiar with CSS and not familiar with XHTML at all. Now, while I'm no kung-fu master, I have been able to design a simple set of webpages for my church using the techniques described in this book, and will soon retrofit some older HTML-only sites. I like this book's approach of starting with simple projects and then developing more complex ones as the things progress. Chapters usually begin with simple (frequently deprecated) HTML coding techniques and then show a better way to gain control of a document with XHTML and style sheets. Thankfully, Castro points out that the deprecated tags are not only admissible with Transitional XHTML, they frequently provide a quick (albeit dirty) solution to your coding needs - if your page needs only one instance of a tag, go for it, don't overcomplicate your style sheet unneccesarily. I very much like the style sheet projects; they really bring into focus their power and potential (my previous CSS experience had been more textbook-oriented, so these were eye-openers.)This is not to say there aren't problems with the book. Frequently Castro begins describing a handy element or attribute only to conclude the section with: "no browser currently supports this." If all of these had been grouped into an appendix called "An Eye to the Future" I'd have no complaint, but to build up these vapor features in the main text was frustrating, if not cruel. Also, I feel the "Formatting: The Old Way" and "Layout: The Old Way" would have worked better at the beginning of the book rather than the end, simply because if you're relatively new to HTML it would give you a better understanding of what is discussed later when Castro presents the New/Better/Right way. The book has a basic one-page-per-idea format, which works about 80% of the time: 10% of the time the topic should have been expanded to two or three pages (and *occasionally* things are); 10% of the time things have been obviously padded. Finally, at the end of the introduction, a Q&A forum is mentioned, but the URL provided is dead; at first I was disappointed since I looked forward to the possibility of peer assistance, but I later found that it had been moved to the "Help" section of the site (hopefully the defunct URL will be redirected, but if not, that's where the forum is). This book is not for everyone: novices may be overwhelmed; more experienced developers may be bored. It's a fairly good introduction for the intermediate user, which made it great for me. Take advantage of the sample pages here at Amazon to get a feel for whether it's for you or not. If the excerpts make sense to you, but don't induce coma, you're a good candidate for getting a lot out of this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Somewhat Disappointing: Good information, bad format.
Review: I was very interested in getting the Visual Quickstart Guide for XHTML. I have been a fan of the VQS series since I first encounterd the DHTML Visual Quickstart Guide. I must admit, though, that I was somewhat disappointed in this book. It was not as well constructed as many other books in the series. As with all VQS guides it has a companion web site. This is a very good site, especially with the examples and the Q&A section. Ms. Castro provides plenty of good information and the examples can explain many things that are not described well in the book. I suggest that more benefit would be had from these examples were the readers to have access to multiple browsers. The way the pages appear in each browser are very informative. The problem I had was, well, approach. The first part of the book dealt primarily with the HTML aspects of web design. While this is useful to a point, it seems overbearing, especially if your primary focus of reading is to gain a greater knowledge of XHTML. In addition to this, the format seems more geared toward a web base than a paper base. Many times, she wrote that a topic would be discussed more completely on page such and such. While I understand that this is a good way to avoid repetiveness, as well as to cut down on the size of the manuscript. But the constant reference to other pages became wearing. For the most part, I felt that these references would have been better as a hotlink on a web page, than as a page to turn to in a book. This approach turned me off, as I would have much preferred a slow design-up style of writing, from the beginning steps to the actual coding. For others it may not seem as irritating. A great deal of information was presented in the book. Many tags were discussed, though not all. Much of ths was not presented in an entertaining way, and after some time, I had to rest from the book because it seemed dry. This is not something I had encountered in other Visual Quick Start guides I had read. I also feel too much time was spent discussing deprecated tags. These tags are an important part of HTML, though I was more interested in the XHTML and CSS portions of the book. I would also have poreferred a discussion of transitional strategies. If you are experienced at coding HTML, you are likely to find less value in this book than one new to HTML. If you are interested in XHTML and have HTML experience this is not the best resource, though some of the information provided is valuable. Based on the format, I would have given this book one star. Based on the overall HTML content, I would probably have given the book three and a half stars. Based on XHTML content I could only give this book two stars. However, bearing in mind the utility of the VQS guides to novice HTML coders, I have to give this 3 stars. I cannot recommend this for experienced Web Developers as there is little information that is particularly advanced.
Rating:
Summary: The best resource on HTML
Review: I use only one book for HTML and this is it. This book will teach you everything about designing good web pages and will become your one and only desktop reference. Everything written by Elizabeth Castro is great and this book is the best I have read so far on the subject of web design. This book pays for itself -- buy it now!
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