Learn HTML and CSS - From A Book!
I know, right?
There exist many tomes covering all range of programming topics. But crack open a programming book and you’ll typically find, well, a textbook. For new developers, especially, programming textbooks can often be dense and intimidating and thus not an especially appealing resource.
Besides, any seasoned programmer will tell you that the only way to learn how to code is to write code.
Enter Jon Duckett’s HTML&CSS.
This book is accessible. Beautiful and rich images fill each page. In addition to the major design appeal, this book is extremely practical. Elements of HTML and CSS are broken up into their smallest possible units and are clearly explained in an engaging manner. Each chapter focuses on a particular concept or set of related concepts which makes it easy to flip to the exact section one seeks. Perhaps best of all, each chapter concludes with a sample layout and stylesheet that incorporates the concepts covered in that particular chapter and an image is also provided to show how the code would render in a browser.
The book does combine CSS and HTML in the same document. While I understand this decision from a usability standpoint, the reader will need to research on his or her own how to separate stylesheets from HTML. This is easy to do, though, and is not really a negative in my mind.
Finally, the book touches on HTML5 and CSS3, explaining some of the new features of each and potential implementation pitfalls.
I cracked open this book as someone with limited HTML proficiency and absolutely no CSS experience and was able to build my own website from scratch in the span of several hours. If the book didn’t weigh as much as it does, I’d carry it with me everywhere to use as a reference.