Most computer books are crap. I speak from the experience of reading many and having a part in writing a few. For some reason this is especially true with HTML books. (I know, grammar police, I know, there are no gradations of "true". Leave me alone.) It seems like the authors are faced with the decision of whether to write a how to or an encyclopedia and they either write an encyclopedia, which is useless if you don't know what you don't know, or they just give up and write a hybrid of the two that is impossible to navigate and largely inane.
There are two glaring exceptions that I found immensely useful in the last redesign of this site, when I was doing all XHTML, without any content management software. (Wow, the stone age.) I highly recommend them both to anyone who is doing the same. Even if you do use a tool like movable type, you still want to know what the HTML code is doing and how to design a site, so I still recommend them.
The Visual Quickstart Guide HTML for the World Wide Web is so much better than any other first book on the subject that it's kind of amazing. If you walk through this book step by step you will …
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