1. If you are already a Web Developer with knowledge of HTML, Form, URL etc, then this book wont add anything more to your knowledge.
2. Most often Web Developers (not Web Designers) lack knowledge about image/icon creation, CSS, DOCTYPE types, XHTML etc. This book gives a good explanation of those concepts.
3. The best part of book is the Part III (chapter 11 to 17) that explains the concepts of CSS. Anyone who liked 2 and 3 will also like Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML (Head First) that seems to be structured similarly and provides similar knowledge.

This is an excellent resource to learn modern W3C-standards-compliant web design from the ground up. It is up-to-date , well organized, well written, and easy to follow. By the time you're done with it, you will be well on your way to being able to call yourself a web designer with a straight face. My only complaint is that the book is physically fragile and the binding completely falls apart even with moderate use. And given how great this book is in all other respects, mere "moderate use" is pretty much out of the question - this will be your constant companion as you take your first steps in web design.

I have had limited experience creating web pages. Learning Web Design has made the task so much easier. This book is very clearly written with great examples. I would highly recommend if you are just starting out or looking for a text to use in the classroom.

I rate this book with 5 stars for being a solid introduction to (X)HTML and CSS and for being clear, easy to follow, and colourful.

I disagree with the previous reviewer BB, who said the book was not for beginners and rated it with one star. He mentions Jennifer N. Robbins uses vocabulary she hasn't defined before. Well, if he's talking about terms like web browser, web server, or link, I might agree with him/her, but hey, those words are common vocabulary words for any Internet user. Perhaps if he had pointed out specific words, I might have said a bit more on his review.

Let me convince you: I'm not a native English speaker and I got the information perfectly well.

It is a shame this book has fallen into 4.5 stars just because of one 1 star rating review informing about problematic issues with no sort of justification or examples proving what the reviewer is complaining about.

In any case, we have to respect his/her opinion, though I didn't take his comments or rating into account when deciding whether to buy the book or not; the book turned out just fine, as I had expected based on the other reviews.

Jennifer Robins has done a great job introducing the reader to virtually all html elements (I guess all, but a professional might notice a few of them are missing).

The contents are colourful as hell, well organised, and they follow a static format scheme that allows for easy readability; the author uses sidebars every now and then to point out key information; the book shows she has a clear mind on how to get a beginner to digest the information presented.

I think the technique she used to introduce us to the different aspects of html/css is just the more appropiate for a starter book. She goes over every aspect, then she writes a sample code about that specific one, and then she shows the resulting page. Once again, she'll colour-code the html code, and then either encase the result in a box, or take a screenshot.

Where I want to get to here is, you aren't going to find a ten pages long html code combining every single element she's gone over and beating the crap out of everyone who tries to read it and point out each section in the resulting html page.

That being said, and bearing in mind the other reviews, I guess nothing else can be said about this great piece of work.

This is an excellent book if you are a novice looking to learn HTML and CSS.
The book is easy to read and follow, and includes a companion website which has downloadable code examples with which you can practice.
I purchased this book with the intention of using it as an easy CSS reference, but ended up learning some excellent HTML skills, as well.

This is, by far, the most useful and easy-to-read book on web design that I have seen / purchased so far.

I am a programmer by trade, but find it useful to be aware of, if not proficient in, web technologies. I purchased this book because I have been dabbling in web design for a long time now, but never as a primary task. This book is useful as a review of the current web standards and techniques, as well as an introduction for individuals who may be new to the topics discussed therein. The chapters are succinct, providing the reader all the necessary information to become informed without wasting time on details that may be distracting for review or overwhelming for beginners. I highly recommend this book.

This book is a great beginning guide to web design. The book does not overload you and sticks with the basics, but offers you other resources to dive deeper into various topics.

This book also gives you great examples to follow and exercises to do on your own. I found that doing the exercises helped me gain a better understanding of the various web design techniques.

This book has given me a huge head start with xhtml, css, and web graphics. I started with zero understanding of web design and now I have the tools to make a good looking functional website.

This book provides a very thorough survey of building web pages using XHTML guidelines. The book progresses logically and intuitively, however that is one of it's main drawbacks. In my opinion the book would benefit from being more hands on. As it stands, there is a distinct lack of application after understanding. It would serve the book better to use a fusion of CSS along with XHTML so that one could learn both types of documents at the same time in order to develop an understanding of how the two work together.

That being said, I learned a ton from this book and am now able to make my own web pages. I consult the book often when need requires and find it very useful and easy to use.

For those who are serious about learning web design and its concepts and new standards, here is my favorite book from O'Reilly: "Learning Web Design" by Jennifer Niederst Robbins. This book is "a beginner;s guide to (X)HTML, style sheets (css), and web graphics.

This book was a great insight on using HTML markup for structure and css for presentation. I heard this concept for a while, but couldn't quite grasp it until I read this book. It gave real examples with downloadable files and it's structured more like a classroom in a book so you can follow along the lessons. Jennifer also gave some exercises to test the readers understanding of the material and provided the solutions so reader can check their work. Since I actually was working on menus for my clients, the menu example really came in handy.

This is my very absolute favorite book on web design and I highly recommend it for anyone trying to understand the concepts of HTML markup and CSS

The book is in excellent condition. The shipment was quick.
Thank you very much for it

I found the first few chapters to be interesting, learning some of the different branches that a person can go into in web design, and some of the "working terminology" for the different work roles and so forth.

But after a few chapters, as I'm reading I feel like I'm sitting in a big university classroom being told the "only real right way" to be a web designer. The tone of the book and much of the terminology used to describe things leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I'm an open-minded guy looking to get into freelance web design, and any time someone tries to present "the mould which must be fit", when speaking about any topic, it turns me off and I pretty much am not willing to learn from them.

I'm not looking to go out and work for some big corporate company and conform to the "official web design methods" as they seem to be being lain out in this book.

That said, there is a lot to learn in here, and it's a dense book. But I'd agree with a previous reviewer who said that the presentation of the ideas is a bit chaotic and disjointed.

If you're of a mind to be lectured to, this book could be worth taking bits and pieces from here and there, but if you're a free-thinking individual you too might notice that this book seems to be telling you the "only right way", instead of simply laying out the fundamentals of web design.

The author is a big time professor in some big universities, so if you're turned off by the sort of "teaching" that is oftentimes done in such places, you probably don't want to waste your time with this one.

I will check out the table of contents and pick out the best info, but this one isn't a keeper as far as I would say.

This book is not for beginners. I am a technology professional and am having trouble learning about web design using this book. One improvement would be to eliminate any definitions that contain a term that has not been defined and is completely unknown to the reader. Another would be to have a glossary. At least, one could then look up the unknown term. Found minor error in explaining how to do things on the PC; don't know about Apple. Structure of book was also too complicated.

This is a very easy intro to xhtml and css. It's got nice full-color pictures, the text is very easy to read and understand, it's well worth the 30 bucks. I'm really glad I read it. The one thing I can't understand is why she doesn't mention css editors, in the software part of the book. She mentions only wysiwyg editors like dreamweaver; since reading the book I've found a css editor that has really helped me both understand and work with css. Something to add in ed. 4?

Ms. Robbins has done a fantastic job of translating a technical language into easy to understand terms. If you're in the beginning stages and early intermediate stages of web design, this is an essential book to read from cover to cover. Her style is serious, yet offered with a dry wit that has caused me to chuckle out-loud more than once.
The few weaknesses that I found were the sections on integrating CSS style sheets with the XHTML markup and VERY minimal examples of layout. The first 3/4 of the manual were so thorough that I'm still taken aback at how thinly she scratched the surface of how to bring it all together in a functioning 1-4 column design.
All-in-all a solid and necessary book!

I would give this book five stars if there weren't a few typos/code example errors which could possibly be quite confusing for someone not too familiar with HTML.

The book definitely starts out very basic; if you knew absolutely nothing about HTML (and not much about the internet, either), you would still be able to use this book. Since I at least knew HTML going in, I looked at the first few chapters as a very basic review that taught me a little extra about standards compliance.

I knew next to nothing about CSS when I bought this book, but now I have a solid foundation of knowledge. The exercises for using (X)HTML and CSS in this book are excellent, and you don't need anything more than a text program to do all of the basic (X)HTML and CSS examples.

Highly recommended for anyone looking to learn (X)HTML or CSS. Just watch out for those scattered code errors.

Clear directions. Good practice activities that are downloaded from her website. This is a great beginner book.

The book gives you a good foundation and then helps you find other resources to build off of it. The screen shots accompanying code helps clarify anything that was not simplified through text - which is very rare.

This is one of the better books to introduce a novice to XHTML through easy to understand lessons. I found it to far exceed the ability to present web design and graphics concepts than I found with many intro guides including Sam's. Would recommend.

This is a superb book, clearly written, filled with current information, well developed, nicely laid out, printed in color so it's easy to read all the way through, or dip into a particular section. I have designed websites, taken various classes, and read several books on the topic of web design and css and this is the best by far. This should be in everyone's bookshelf.

"Learning Web Design", 3rd Edition, by Jennifer Niederst Robbins, is a very thoughtful book for someone starting Web Design from 'scratch'. It has been one of my main motivators for consistent learning. The book actually assigned for my class is not nearly as comprehensive. There are a handful of errors, but they are mostly minor. Only if you are paying close attention will you notice them. Overall, I am very satisfied. It's worth every penny.

Kudos to Jennifer Robbins for writing a technical book in layman's terms. Her writing, examples, exercises and outline of the book allow a person with very little (X)TML/HTML/CSS skills to understand the rudimentary mark up it takes to create a Web page. While I say rudimentary, the book goes beyond that and, I have to admit, for those who have never dived into creating Web pages, there is a learning curve. As she states somewhere, the book is like being in her classroom. The book is very much like a textbook but without being dry. And while the exercises are clearly laid out, it would oh-so nice to be able to have Jennifer go over the exercises "live". But, we are talking about a book.

I gave the book four stars instead of five for two reasons:

1) She doesn't meld (X)MTL mark up and CSS together very well. While she does an excellent job at explaining the two, she presents the mark up language in such detail that I almost became too dependent upon mark up and had a hard time bridging to CSS and making the two come together. While she makes a great distinction between the two and emphasizes how potent CSS is and how using CSS can eliminate redundancy in (X)HTML and make pages load more quickly, she never quite brings the two together to make it all click.

She says in Chapter 8, I believe, maybe it's Chapter 9, that one can skip the next few chapters and go directly to the CSS part if they so choose. Not a good idea.

2) I was astonished at the amount of typos and the errata. The errata are corrected on the publisher's Website. I didn't know about the availability of the corrections until I spent two hours following an example and an exercise and never achieved the right results, despite following the book mark up by mark up. Being extremely frustrated, I wanted to contact the publisher. I finally went to the publisher's Web page and saw the errata section. Maybe I should have known that this is typical for technical books. Did I miss something in the introduction that states there's and errata page on the Web? (The same holds true for errata for "1 Hour Web Site: 120 Professional Templates and Skins.")

But it's the amount of blatant typos that took me aback. The typos get in the way of Robbins' excellent writing. It's like listening to a great CD that has a scratch in the middle of a song.

All in all it is a very good resource. I appreciate, too, that it is in color.

One last thing: Actually do the "TEST YOURSELF" exercises. By doing them, it allows that much more of her teaching to sink in.

This book is a fantastic introduction (or refresher course) for the nuts and bolts of web design. Information is presented with a remarkably clean, fresh and simple approach that emphasizes web standards and helps you look out for common pitfalls. For those (like me) who got their chops in the early days of the Internet, this is a great refresher course.

One thing this will NOT teach you is how to design for the web. There's virtually no real or valuable discussion of aesthetics, layout, interaction, user experience... visually speaking, you'll have to go with something else - I recommend the very excellent Principles of Beautiful Web Design by Jason Beaird - but for (X)HTML, CSS, image compression and all of the technical aspects of web design, you can't get much better than this book.

the product was exactly like it was mentioned in the description and I am very happy with the purchase

As a 60-year-old woman beginning to develop a website, I found
this book to be unquestionably the most helpful book I have read. I
appreciate the fact that it is also well-written.

I now have a comprehensive understanding of what I am doing,
which makes learning code much, much easier.

It's a curious aspect of creating sites for the World Wide Web that its not always clear what the titles of the people who perform the functions necessary to do this should be. When I think of design, I think of determining what a site should look like. Robbins thinks that web design is about coding the documents that will ultimately be displayed in a browser window. That's what this book is about, and I'll use her definition in the future.

Web sites are prepared by creating a document in a form that web browsers can translate into something that can be presented on a monitor screen using a special set of symbols called Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). "Learning Web Design" teaches the reader how to use this language to develop a site.

The book introduces broad concepts and then shows the specific language necessary to create content, neatly organized into chapters that deal with text, links, images, tables, and forms. Next the author discusses the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which is the current method of giving form to the content that allows smaller, quicker loading, and easier-to-change documents. Each chapter presents the basic concepts, walks the reader through exercises that apply the concepts, and then presents a review and test to make sure the reader grasps the chapter. Documents to work on are easily downloaded from a dedicated web site. While the lessons provide the basic information necessary to create a web site, Robbins generously sprinkles the chapters with references to web sites that examine more complex issues for those interested in learning more or developing special applications.

This book teaches web design in as simple and clear a manner as is possible for this topic, and no one interested in learning how to create a web site from scratch will be disappointed.

The real question is why one might want to learn to create a web site from scratch? Today many web-hosting providers make an on-line tool available that lets people create a basic site. If all you want to do is create such a site, you don't need to know HTML. However, if you want to provide something more complex, you can create a site by writing the language yourself.

At the other end of the scale, if you expect to create many sites, you may find it more expedient (but also more expensive) to use software like Dreamweaver. However, while Dreamweaver doesn't require you to know HTML, it may be easier to use if you understand what's going on "under the hood." And even with Dreamweaver, occasionally things get so complex that the quickest solution to a web design problem may be writing in HTML.

Some experienced web design people say that once you have learned HTML it's quicker and easier to write it directly. (Occasionally, I think this point of view may be just showing off, but mostly I believe it.)

There are also some people (like myself) who learned HTML several years ago and have not kept up with changes. In recent years eXtensable HTML (XHTML) (a more precise mark-up language) and CSS have come onto the scene that newer browsers can use to present more effective websites. This book is an excellent way to update one's knowledge.

If you find that you need to learn HTML, or XHTML, or CSS, I can't imagine a clearer text than this book.

This book is a great beginner book for those hardly familiar with HTML web design. I'm using it as a textbook for a college course and find the material to be easy to follow and very descriptive. Even if this isn't required reading, it's a great book to get you started in the right direction of not only understanding what it takes to design a site, but also what it takes to update and maintain one.

Learning Web Design, 3rd Edition is pleasure to read, it is really well written. It begins with how to start, how the Web works, and the nature of Web design and she makes it interesting.

The second part of the book is on HTML markup and standards based structure. Here you learn how to start with your content, to give it a logical structure, to add your text, links, images, to use tables and forms, and to understand today's and tomorrow's standards.

The third part of Learning Web Design is about CSS for presentation. You learn how you can develop your own unique and beautiful web sites, and how to change them easily just by modifying your CSS styles.

Creating Web graphics and optimizing them for the Web fills the fourth part of the book, and the shorter fifth part is about the site development process and getting your pages on the web.

There are exercises throughout the book that you can do to test and solidify your learning. There is a Web support page with material you can use for some of the exercises.

When you are done with your studies, or even before that, this book is a good reference where you can easily find the information you need for most of the tasks you want to do or problems you may have.

Jennifer Robins writes reading this book "feels like sitting in my classroom." It must be a very nice classroom.

I used the second edition of this book for working on our NVMUG site and converting it to standards base CSS. This third edition of Learning Web Design is almost totally new and so much improved that I have ordered a copy for myself.

Jennifer Niederst Robbins' LEARNING WEB DESIGN, 3RD EDITION is subtitled 'A Beginner's Guide to XTML, Style Sheets, and Web Graphics', and herein lies its power. Chapters covering these professional ideas tell everything needed to know how Web pages work and builds a foundation of knowledge, adding applications savvy and advanced topics on top. The book's been completely revised to show how to blend modern design practices into web site design and includes exercises and quizzes, also making it a top classroom assignment pick. An excellent addition to any serious college-level computer library.

I was very impressed with this book, as it provides an excellent introduction to a standards-based approach for creating web sites. Developers or designers who are new to writing HTML, or individuals who are simply looking for a refresher book should look no further. The author takes the reader through the whole process of creating a web site: from HTML, to adding style elements, to basic graphics considerations, to more advanced topics. This is a very well thought out, thorough book.

Frankly, I was surprised at the depth of material included in this book. In addition to an excellent CSS reference, the author goes into more advanced topics, including the CSS box model, what exactly is Unicode, and even how to create web graphics. The addition of this extra material will satisfy advanced readers, but also give beginning HTML coders something to work up towards. In other words, once you cover the basic material of this book, there's still more material for you to learn.

If I had my way, I'd make this book required reading for all web developers. This is a great addition to any web developer's library. Even those who already have a lot of experience with creating web sites--you might learn something.

As a web developer, I like to keep a copy of an html and style sheet reference handy. This book does a very good job at that, so it has become my new reference.

So, you want to learn how to design web pages and sites. Well, the title suggests you came to the right place. Did you? In my opinion, yes. The book covers the basics of HTML and XHTML, along with the CSS necessary to show it off.
It's amazing how much - and how quickly - web design has changed over the last few years. If you're new to the party, this book explains the current best practices in a clear manner. If you haven't kept up, this book will prove to be a good refresher course.
The text is concise and clean, and the use of colors and a multitude of sidebars really enhance the learning experience. There is a strong emphasis on the separation of content (XHTML) and presentation (CSS), which, as we all know by now, is a good thing.

Perhaps it is apropos that for a book on web page design, the pages are quite prettily laid out. With an appealing mix between the text and the illustrations. Adds to the pleasure of reading and (hopefully) learning.

One change from books on web design from just a few years ago is the inclusion here of different browsing environments. Not just different browsers for the desktop personal computer, which might be your first thought. The important new thing is a mention of designing pages for the mobile Web. Which, in practice, means cellphones. Sadly, the mention is just that. All too brief; half a page. Given the growing economic importance of the mobile Web, the author should seriously consider a strong expansion of this topic in any future edition of the book.

Other parts of the book do show an up to date understanding of web design. Including a useful sidebar of deprecated elements in XHTML. Like applet, center, and font. Try to adhere to these recommendations, by not using the elements in your new pages.

There is a chapter explaining how to put links into your page. Links are of course what really makes the Web so powerful. There could have been a quick explanation of why you should carefully ponder what you write in the anchor text of a link. Search engines often use the contents of the anchor text as an important input into their weighting schemes for your pages. In other words, it behooves you to write as meaning a text as possible. Helps in the search engine optimisation.

It's been awhile since I've taken a look at what passes for a beginning web development book these days. I decided to examine Learning Web Design: A Beginner's Guide to (X)HTML, StyleSheets, and Web Graphics (3rd edition) by Jennifer Niederst Robbins. All I want to know is... why weren't books like this around when I was trying to learn this stuff?

Contents:
Part 1 - Getting Started: Where Do I Start?; How the Web Works; The Nature of Web Design
Part 2 - HTML Markup for Structure: Creating a Simple Page (HTML Overview); Marking up Text; Adding Links; Adding Images; Basic Table Markup; Forms; Understanding the Standards
Part 3 - CSS For Presentation: Cascading Style Sheets Orientation; Formatting Text (Plus More Selectors); Colors and Backgrounds (Plus Even More Selectors and External Style Sheets); Thinking Inside the Box (Padding, Borders, and Margins); Floating and Positioning; Page Layout with CSS; CSS Techniques
Part 4 - Creating Web Graphics: Web Graphics Basics; Lean and Mean Web Graphics
Part 5 - From Start to Finish: The Site Development Process; Getting Your Pages on the Web
Appendix A - Answers; Appendix B - CSS 2.1 Selectors; Index

The first clue that things were different is that it's a full color book. So not only can the code examples be color-coded for clarity, but you don't get black-and-white graphics that attempt to illustrate a full-color web page. Next, covering XHTML and CSS together means that the reader gets the correct foundation for how to separate content from structure. I personally still have a bad habit of using HTML tags instead of using CSS like I really should. Had I had Robbins' book when I first learned, I'm inclined to think I'd have fewer bad habits to get rid of. Finally, she hits a sweet spot in covering issues like browser quirks and incompatibilities. It's not so in-depth that the beginner gets lost, yet it's detailed enough that even those who have been doing web work for some time will likely pick up or rediscover a few things they didn't know or had forgotten.

For those working through the book as a tutorial, there are plenty of exercises that reinforce the skills you've acquired. After going through the material, there should be very little in the way of HTML and CSS coding that won't make sense. The only part of web design that this book doesn't cover is JavaScript. So if you're coming to this book hoping to learn how to make your page dynamic and interactive via scripting, you'll go away disappointed. Personally, I think it was a wise decision to leave that out. The target audience is more likely to want to build a basic page with static content to get started. Throwing programming skills at them might be enough to confuse and discourage, which would be a shame. There's more than enough material here with HTML and CSS to get plenty of value for your book buying dollar.

I have a colleague at work who is dipping her toe into the world of web design. She asked me if I knew of any good books to get her started. I'll be shipping my copy to her, as I'm quite confident this will be exactly what she needs...