Cover of Head First HTML
First and foremost, I am a persistence layer software developer. I don’t do much UI work and what little UI work I do usually involves rich client UIs. I rarely do any web UI work.
Having said that, I think it’s important to know at least a little bit about web UI technologies, even if you are a back-end developer. Why? Well, at the very least, you will be able to understand the vocabulary of the UI guys you work with. Furthermore, you never know when you might have to look for a new job and there’s a good chance they’ll want you to know about some of that web UI stuff.
With that in mind, I recently picked up a copy of Head First HTML with CSS and XHTML to see if I could learn a thing or two. I just finished the book and I wanted to share my thoughts on it.
There are a lot of HTML books out there so you might be wondering why I got this particular HTML book . One reason is that it got a rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars from 193 reviewers on Amazon.com. That’s a pretty good score! Another reason is because I’ve skimmed some of the other books in the Head First series and I think they are pretty darn fun to read.
So what do I think of this book? It’s fantastic! It’s fun to read, engaging, informative and full of humor. It has numerous interesting activities and exercises to reinforce learning. It has lots of diagrams, photos and colors. I has plenty of jokes. And, on top of all that, the authors seem to really know their stuff.
If you read this book, you will learn the fundamentals of HTML, XHTML and CSS. You will learn it quickly and you won’t feel like you’re being tortured. Most importantly, you will have fun.
No book is perfect however. My biggest quibble is the horrible index. I had a hard time finding anything and I had to keep on adding my own items to the index with a pencil. You CANNOT expect to use this book as a reference. It should be viewed strictly as a tutorial.
Also, by no means is this book a comprehensive resource on CSS. For example, it didn’t even talk about the min-width property for setting the minimum width of your page. Lots of sites use this feature. I can’t believe the authors didn’t mention it in their chapter on layouts.
The authors also spend quite a bit of time modularizing headers, footers and sidebars but they neglect to mention that it won’t help you that much if you are have a purely static HTML website, where you would have to go through much pain to make any changes to them (how much fun would it be to make the same change in 100 pages?). I feel the authors should have at mentioned this problem and recommended that you investigate server-side-includes, PHP, JSP or ASP as a solution to this problem.
Contrary to what the book’s cover says, I don’t think you’ll “launch your web career in one chapter”. However, this book is definitely an excellent starting point for anyone who is new to these technologies.
Pros: Extremely fun to read. Teaches most of the fundamentals. Teaches standards compliance.
Cons: Horrible index.
Rating: 4.5/5
