New Perspectives on Creating Web Pages with HTML and XML

Rating:
Summary: Bug Infested, Verbose, Pretty Pictures.
Review: Very high quality paper, printing, photos, and binding. But in my opinion...

The content is low quality. If you have to read this book for a class, you have my sympathies. If you do not absolutely have to read Carey's book, find another HTML book.

XHTML claim: The cover says "Includes XHTML coverage throughout". I found precious little to support that. I did find XHTML code violations all over the book and code files.

Next the errors: I downloaded the student files on 4/27/04. Every code file which I tested with XHTML code validation (strict, transitional, and frameset) failed miserably. There are case (upper/lower) violations. There are mostly tag closing (xhtml) errors throughout. There are unbalanced tags like in figure 5-19 on page 5-20. There are missing quotes like in figure 5-29 on page 5-27. There are instructional (bold) typos like item 3 on page 5-33. There is the demo on the author's web site which does not work (as of this date) on page 6-46. There is the JavaScript if/else error repeated five (5) times on pages 8-31 and 8-32 before getting it right at the bottom of 8-32. There are others.

Verbose: Carey uses too many words, stories, and pages to convey a limited amount of HTML. Maybe he should switch dime store novels so that he can entertain people who want that.

Off Purpose: Cary spent 2 out of 10 chapters on JavaScript when he should have used the ink to finish the job of covering HTML and CSS. JavaScript is too big of a job to cover in 2 chapters and he did not finish either HTML or CSS first. This makes for a disjointed and incomplete book.

Publisher errors: What was the publisher doing to pass this many problems? This confirms something I read from another reviewer regarding Course Technologies. I doubt quality is very important at Course Technologies / Thompson Learning. These guys are off my "buy list".

The book does have some good information and value, but there are too many problems which get into the way. I wish I had not purchased this very expensive book, or had not marked in it, so that it could be returned.