HTML 4 For Dummies, 5th Edition

HTML 4 for Dummies provides an introduction to Web publishing, but it contains less information than it should. If you don't know HTML at all, you'll be able to extract some worthwhile information from these pages. But if you're at all familiar with HTML and want this book to bring you up to speed on what's new in the HTML 4 specification, you'll be disappointed.

The book presents a super-simple "Hello, World" HTML document that illustrates the most basic structure of an HTML document. The authors then spend 100 pages flailing around with confusing discussions of organization and graphic design. (Sample sentence: "The Web is both a cooperative and a competitive environment; it depends on interdependence, but it's impatient with boredom.") Eventually, they get back to the information about tags that the intended audience needs--and they do a good job of explaining how to build headers, images, links, tables, and frames with HTML code. But the coverage would be better if they had included more illustrations of what the tags do. The discussion of cascading style sheets (CSS) is feeble, and there's no DHTML (dynamic HTML) code in evidence at all.

Your best bet is to look for a better HTML 4 text for beginners. HTML 4 for the World Wide Web: Visual QuickStart Guide is a good choice, as is HTML 4 Bible. --David Wall