HTML 4 for Dummies Quick Reference

Rating:
Summary: Good for Beginners!
Review: As a quick reference, I think this book does the job. Maybe adding some more screen shots would be of help, especially for those short of technical experience.

Rating:
Summary: The single book I refer to most often.....
Review: Before I bought this one, I had two pendaflex folders full of cheat sheets on syntax, tricks, etc. that I would paw through when I was trying to get a certain result. Now I'm down to this book and about 20 individual sheets of paper. I think that's evidence that the book is a nice job. Only complaint is that it should have more specifics on META tags. When setting up an automatic link (HTTP-EQUIV) to a new page from an old one the other day, I had to go back to my old "cheat sheets" as the book wasn't QUITE adquate in this area. But still highly recommended -- the color chart in the front is worth the price by itself.

Rating:
Summary: Good reference
Review: I am using the book in conjunction with an online course...the book has really helped give me some background into HTML and web design/development. I have found it very useful and think this will be a great reference in the future.

Rating:
Summary: Makes web development easy...
Review: I am using the book in conjunction with an online course...the book has really helped give me some background into HTML and web design/development. I have found it very useful and think this will be a great reference in the future.

Rating:
Summary: This a very good begging to learn HTML
Review: I had new a little html before I got this book but after I got this book my web pages went from looking like something a high school freshman could do after a weekend to something that looks fairly professional I really enjoyed this book and will be getting java for dummies also if it half as good as this one

Rating:
Summary: Very good reference book for beginners.
Review: I use this book all the time. The spiral edition was a great idea, it allows me to lay it flat so I can read and work at the same time. Perfect reference tool for learning basic to advanced HTML. Has a very handy color "cheat sheet" in the front to change your font colors quickly, and easily. I recomend this book highly.

Rating:
Summary: Very helpful
Review: It helped me very much as I was a child 8-9 but as I got older I
learned this information with out the use of this book.
this book is for those who just know a few basic HTML codes and would like to help make their site more flashy and complex
I highly recommand this book to ages 8-14 this is not a very complex book and is easily understood by younger ages but you must have a working knowledge of html before trying to use this book

signed Trenton

Rating:
Summary: Html 4 for dummies
Review: It helps me make a web page up. i find it real usefull.

Rating:
Summary: Delightful Little Book
Review: Over the years, I've learned many programming languages (technically, HTML isn't one, but I'll ignore that technicality). The primary way I've learned them is with books, such as those by MS Press, Sams and even the Dummies series. Many programming books are bad; the Dummies books, particularly so. They tend to overly dumb down concepts to a point of being so vague that the message is lost.

But not this book.

The information in HTML4 Quick Reference is highly concentrated. It does start out so simply that a developer new to HTML is rightfully tempted to skip the first few chapters. Fortunately, the structure of the book allows one to do this. Outside of the absolute most basic things (The structure of HTML, links and images), each part (The book is divided in to parts & sections, not chapters) stands independently. Each part is, for lack of a better comparison, a step-by-step guide.

The only real "style" the code has is that each tag is placed on its own line. It lacks indenting, something that is quite necessary in a hierarchy-based language such as HTML. But this could be as much due to the books small form-factor as the authors' personal preference.

The book does feature a writing style for code, though. One of the most important things the Rays preach is writing tags in pairs, e.g.

and then filling in the attributes as opposed as right-to-left, top-to-bottom style that many other books take. They also make effective use of formatting their own sample code with bold to highlight additions.

At least one of the reviews before me claimed the color-reference to be worth the price of the book alone. While, admittedly, it is handy, it is slightly flawed. For one, it, as with all things printed, is printed with CMYK coloring. There is a disclaimer before the colors appear, but this point needs to be stressed: The colors on screen will not match the colors on the page. The second complaint I have with the color guide- The colors appear in numerical order: #000000, #000033, ..., #FFFFCC, #FFFFFF. It would be better to have sorted them by hue or luminosity, similar to Macromedia Dreamweaver's color palette. Although, admittedly, if you're doing work in a WYSIWYG editor, this book is not nearly as important as if you're developing in a text-editor.

As far as I'm concerned, the heart of this book lies in its appendices. In an organized fashion, it lists a majority of HTML 4 tags, their attributes, a description of each tag and attribute, their status within HTML (deprecated, which version of HTML they originated in, or what browser(s) support them exclusively).

Appendix B features the various symbols (&, ü, etc.), their numeric representation, the Mnemonic representation (& = & amp;) and a description of what each represents. It would have been nice if the list was divided into categories of some sort, instead of just listing them numerically like the colors, but the natural ordering within the ANSI/Unicode character spec provides for some degree of natural organization.

Appendix C is a brief list of CSS 1 properties and values. This appendix glosses over too much, but if what you need to know is contained within it, it's faster and easier then searching for the information elsewhere on the web. Of course, my edition of this book came out less then 2-years after CSS1 was formalized.

Rating:
Summary: My best HTML book (so far)
Review: This book is fantastic! I learned enough HTML from this book to start producting my own web pages. It covers all the basics and enough on frames and CSS that I can play around with them also. Being a quick reference, it cuts thru the wordiness of regular texts and gets the the point. It has a color cheat sheet in the front, however I found that it is not a true color reference and I have to use the color palet on one of my HTML editors for true color. Still, it is the best HTML book that I have (so far).