HTML 4 Bible

In HTML 4 Bible, you'll find a comprehensive definition of what is considered state of the art in Web-publishing languages. The book explains HTML tags and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) thoroughly, and it gives some attention to JavaScript as well.

Authors Pfaffenberger and Gutzman use a helpful problem-and-solution format that provides straightforward answers to common problems--they show you how to build image maps and create attractive forms, to cite two examples.

What's special about the book's approach is that it doesn't get sidetracked by the universe of detail that HTML 4 presents. Rather than choosing to ploddingly document the characteristics of one tag after another, Pfaffenberger and Gutzman explain their subject by describing how it is applied in practice. They explain, for example, how to arrange textual data so that people are more likely to read it.

The downside to this holistic approach is that HTML 4 Bible isn't the absolutely comprehensive HTML reference many readers will expect it to be. Books like that exist, and you may want to supplement HTML 4 Bible with one of them. But if you want a text that provides informed explanations of how to get the results you want with HTML, this book is for you. --David Wall