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Rating: 
Summary: 2nd edition is much improved...
Review: (...) The 1st edition apparently had some significant issues based on reviews at Amazon, the 2nd edition seems to be much improved.
Chapter list: Planning Your Web Pages; Promoting Your Site; Basic HTML Building Blocks; Organizing Your Site; Putting It on the Web; Getting Fancy with Text; Finding Images; Blending Images into Your Pages; Creating and Enhancing Images; Adding Color Throughout Your Site; Harnessing the Power of Tables; Organizing Your Site with Frames; Styling Web Pages with Cascading Style Sheets; Positioning Elements with DIVs; Getting Input with Forms; Making Dynamic Pages with JavaScript; Navigating Your Web Site; Adding Dynamic Page Elements with DHTML; Animating with Macromedia Flash; Adding Multimedia and Other Objects; Blogging; Setting Up Your Store; Selling on eBay; Getting Paid; Using Advertising; Covering All the Bases; Maintaining Your Site; Designing with XML; Making Your Site Mobile with WAP/WML; HTML 4.01 Specs; XHTML 1.0, Second Edition specs; XML 1.0, Third Edition Specs; WML 2.0 Specs; JavaScript Reference; Glossary; Index
This is one of those books that I personally like, but I don't know if it's right for what I think is the intended audience. I've been doing application development for a long time, and some of that time has been spent doing web development. While I wouldn't grab this book to find an answer to an HTML or JavaScript question, I would use it to understand graphical composition, navigation, and more of the site structure thoughts. There's always new stuff to learn, and it helps to get new ideas from others in that area. And if you've seen my (lack of) graphical ability, you'd understand. Die-hard web designers will also squawk about the reliance on tables and frames for design. I'd tend to agree with them, but I'm also not as dogmatic about the whole issue.
If you're a casual computer use who thinks they have a great idea for a web site, and if you think you could build that site on your own, you'd probably gravitate to a book like this. To be sure, everything you absolutely need to know is in here. But I think you could quickly find yourself overwhelmed with everything you need to learn to set the site up. And when you start talking about setting up an online store and shopping carts, you could end up making mistakes that could cost you dearly in security and fraud.
So is it a good book? In my opinion, yes. It's well-written and there is a lot of valuable information in it. I just tend to think it serves developers with some prior background knowledge better than it would serve a complete newbie.
Rating: 
Summary: Ouch!
Review: I am just beginning to read this book. I just opened it and began reading the first tutorial. It wants me to import a file into my flash 5 project from the CD-ROM that comes with the book. I look into the contents of the CD...nothing! The file "forest.gif" isn't even on the CD! Just by the looks of it, it doesn't look like this book will be very good. I mean, I just now started it! To me, this is embarrasing to the authors. Be careful what you buy folks...
Rating:
Summary: Ouch!
Review: I am just beginning to read this book. I just opened it and began reading the first tutorial. It wants me to import a file into my flash 5 project from the CD-ROM that comes with the book. I look into the contents of the CD...nothing! The file "forest.gif" isn't even on the CD! Just by the looks of it, it doesn't look like this book will be very good. I mean, I just now started it! To me, this is embarrasing to the authors. Be careful what you buy folks...
Rating: 
Summary: Fix a few things for the next edition.
Review: I have been teaching HTML and web design classes for over 4 years and I am always looking for new ideas and techniques and this book certainly has that. There is an abundance of information contained within the 700 plus pages. The book has you working with HTML, CSS, Java Scripting, DHTML and XHTML. You get to try out and design frames pages, tables, forms, multimedia pages and cascading style sheets. Overall everything you need to become a very good designer is in this book including an excellent layout of the HTML 4.01 tags. The cd included has a number of utilities, most of which can be found just about anywhere on the web. Also included is trial version of Flash 5, DreamWeaver 4 and HomeSite 4.5 all of which have newer version out, so the next edition should have this included. Aside from those minor things, the files you are supposed to be able to use for some of the exercises weren't on my cd and I was unable to find them anywhere on the website so I think this needs to be fixed. Other than those fixes the book is very accurate and detailed with plenty of information for everyone
Rating:
Summary: Promising so far
Review: I just got this book and I must say I think it looks very promising. I felt I had to write a review, seeing how I disagree with the only other review written here. I am a beginner and I think the book has a easy-to-understand approach. Also, the cd with the book contains a lot of trial versions, among other things flash5, which I can't wait to test out. (and yes, I checked: all the things that are supposed to be on the cd are there... :) ) So all in all.. this looks very good so far.
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