A while back a friend asked me for some advice on getting into web-design. Now that’s a pretty broad question, kind of like saying you want to “get into cars”, but besides taking a course, which I usually suggest recommend for someone totally new to a subject, there are a few books around, so I suggested he pick up this one.

The reasons I liked this book are mainly that it’s focused on HTML, doesn’t try and teach PHP or another server language, yet still covers things people need to know like how to organize a website, choose an ISP and FTP a site up. The second think I like is that, unlike a lot of the earlier books, it has a strong focus on CSS. Finally, the book has an attractive layout with good use of colour and plenty of screen-shots.

In the past, I found that many books on web design would cover HTML, but usually didn’t provide much of an introduction the CSS other than those Dynamic-HTML (DHTML) – focused books that sort-of became a fad in the late 1990s. Partly I think the reason that these earlier books shied away from CSS was the often wildly-different ways browsers interpreted nearly any kind of CSS beyond the basic font-controls. While it is still true that there are numerous rendering differences, most current browsers give a fairly consistent rendering of CSS up to version 2.1 – CSS 3 is another story and, wisely, this book doesn’t go there.

Where the book falls a bit short is in getting around browser differences, while some books have devoted whole sections to that, I think there could have been some more coverage of that, or maybe it was avoided as it would have probably been confusing to people just learning the HTML. It might have been nice to see some more coverage of JavaScript, but again, JavaScript really would have needed it’s own section (or book) at least.

What puts this book ahead of a lot of others is the coverage of things you need to know in order to write websites beyond strictly HTML/CSS. A couple of these are: once you’ve got more than 4-5 pages, it’s important to organize a site so it’s easy to find and change things when you’re updating. Everybody doing web-design these days should know basic SEO, and that’s covered in the chapter. Related to maintaining and SEO is creating properly formatted pages, and that’s covered as well. Finding a web hosting company and learning FTP is covered too. I also noticed that in the section on graphics, the authors give a bit of a tutorial on using the free Gimp image editor – with a new copy of PhotoShop now costing nearly $1000, it’s good the authors are showing readers, who might not have $1000 to spare, some other options.

It’s good to see a book that doesn’t over-reach. Sams Teach Yourself HTML and CSS sticks mostly to that. Readers might want to pick up a book on CSS afterwards as it really is coming into its own with newer versions of the specification.

Speaking of CSS, on the book’s cover there is mention of HTML5, but most of the coverage is limited to a page or two. Both HTML5 and a newer version of CSS (CSS level 3) are being worked on but not actual finalized standards, though different browsers support parts of the proposals. As of spring 2010, both are still a draft format and while the newest versions of FireFox, Chrome, Safari and Opera support many of the features, especially CSS3, Internet Explorer still supports none and even the much-discussed built-in video tag is of limited usage today because of different video format support with Safari supporting one format, Firefox another and Chrome coming up the middle supporting both formats.

So except for maybe not going into depth on how different browsers handle some parts of CSS, overall, if you are looking for a book for someone who wants to get started learning web design, this is good choice.