I recommend http://www.htmlgoodies.com/ I havn't used the website in 6 years, so I don't know if there are any better ones.
You could learn a lot using tutorials on the web rather than spending the money on a book. Problem is, not everyone who writes tutorials do things properly. For instance, many people forget to close self-closing tags (as in the case of <img /> or <input />). In any case, w3 schools seems to be relatively decent. When I was starting out, I used them a lot for PHP and Javascript (though I found them to format these languages very oddly).
I simply self taught myself years ago. However, unfortunately, websites are infinitely more complicated now so you can't simply reverse engineer them by reading the source code.
great thanks will try w3 school but I am hope that the learning curve doesn't come into play then there is CSS oh lordy lordy
Yea, that's when I stopped messing around with HTML and all that fun stuff. The source code is incredibly complicated on most decent websites.
Take a look at the free website template sites. Look for the full CSS ones and take them appart. Thats what I did to learn how to.
HTML is fairly easy to pick up. Any tutorial website would work. Try Lynda.com you can watch a few of thier tutorials for free ---------- hahaha it's not really as complicated as you might think. It looks compicated but if you've ever built a website it makes sense. Plus you're not really seeing the whole website as it's actually coded in the source code all the time. There's a lot of code for thr backend of the site that gets replaced with content. So when you have a blog and you make entries you don't have to rewrite your code. Usually you just put in some php that tells it to retrieve entries stored in a database. Spins complicated but it's really not... But I'm a web designer, so I'm used to it I guess
Surprisingly I've found that the book "Learn HTML in 24 Hours" is not too bad as a place to start. I agree with Swamp56 that w3schools is decent, although in my opinion they make a better reference than a place to learn. For basic understanding of CSS principles this is helpful; http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/css/ And one of the hardest parts of CSS for beginners to understand is positioning. I highly recommend the explanation provided by BrainJar; http://www.brainjar.com/css/positioning/ They make a relatively complicated concept quite simple to understand.
Eh, I learned HTML CSS and was starting PHP, then I lost interest and learned Visual Basic (which really doesn't have anything to do with websites) and have since not learned anything else. So, to the untrained eye all the new code in websites is a bit frightening. I can still pick out some code if I'm trying to change things around, but the more advanced scripts are lost on me. Next language I want to learn is C++, but I'll actually take a course on it eventually...
I like google books and I also have a program that helps me read them to because I'm so bad with decoding words. Electronics books are the future and I can't wait till everything is like that.
I really like the Head First series, a lot of pepole told me to go to w3schools, and use web tutorials, but they were all poorly written and progressed to quickly. This book really helped me learn (X)HTML. The only thing i didn't like about it, was that it was very repetitive at times, however, it does help you remember/learn better. I also imagine you want to learn CSS, for that I would suggest CSS:The Missing Manual [http://headfirstlabs.com/books/hfhtml/] [http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596526870]