Creating Cool Web Pages With Html/Book and Disk

Rating:
Summary: Very reader friendly
Review: HTML, as a language, is platform independent, so even though this book is put together by Macworld - a magazine for Macintosh users, there's a lot to learn from this book. The only problem is that the floppy disk that comes along with it is of no use to PC users, which means you'll miss out on the software and example files on the floppy.

Having spent over 15 years on the Internet, and designed hundreds of web pages himself, Dave Taylor goes beyond teaching you the nuts and bolts of HTML to show you how to design and create useful, attractive webpages, and then publicise these pages.

After the customary introduction to the Web and HTML, the book slowly slips in HTML tags, organised very logically (unlike the Dummies book that forced them all together). Learning HTML in this step-by-step manner is less overwhelming, and a pleasant learning experience. Each of the chapters introducing different HTML tags has an easy-to-refer summary table to help you refresh your memory.

When you're sufficiently comfortable creating bare-bone text-only pages, the book helps you spruce up your pages with graphics, photographs, audio, and video. All this, while reminding you (and showing you how to) keep those pages shell-account-friendly.

There's an entire chapter dedicated to discussing search engines, and teaching you how to register with some of them, so that you'll be able to use that knowledge to your advantage when you start publicising your pages. This is followed by other ways and means to announce your site to the world.

The book briefly touches upon the more advanced elements of webpages - forms, imagemaps, and CGI scripting. And for those who plan to design full - blown sites instead of just arbit. webpages, the book ends with a very useful step-by-step guide to planning the entire site. Dave has also put together a list of common HTML mistakes that he's committed or been victim to, and has shown how to avoid those mistakes.

Now if only this book was available with software for the PC...