Recommendation: Buy this book for a gentle, colorful and clear introduction to XHTML and a bit of CSS.
I recieved this book as a review copy, and it immediately captivated my attention. If you know nothing about XHTML/CSS and want a good introduction, this is the book to buy! Hughes provides just enough context to make her technical instructions make sense - she does a good job of giving you the brief version of the “why” behind the “how”.
Visually, the book is splendid. It’s full color throughout, complete with screenshots and syntax highlighting on nearly every page. While the content itself is more important, the visual touches make the code listings friendlier and less intimidating.
The chapters are laid out logically, and the table of contents is clear enough that it’s easy to find whatever information you might be looking for. I particularly like the first chapter - it’s an excellent, fundamental introduction to xhtml and the history behind it.
My only complaint about this book is that there isn’t enough of it. It would be wonderful to see a chapter or two (or three?) introducing CSS positioning. I would also like to see a bit more commentary on the box model, since it is such a fundamental concept for more advanced web development. Finally, I’m not sure of the wisdom of including the XHTML DTDs in the appendix; they are easy to locate online, and take up a lot of space for relatively little utility. How many people who are just learning XHTML really benefit from the DTDs?
My experience: I have used this book as a text in an introductory web class, and the comments from students were very positive.