My son needed this book for school and we received in time for school. Great service!

The books code uses depreciated HTML standards such as the font and center tags. The code is not well documented either. The JavaScript examples also lack good code structure. Some of the reference links in the book are dead. Aside from the many negative things about the book it has some good tips and the book layout is not to bad. The binding in the book is also decent. Each page is lamented so you will have extended life from it even if you spill stuff on it. Overall I would not recommend this book to a beginner because it will encourage them to use depreciated methods and coding.

Web pages are written in HTML, and Barksdale teaches this for an absolute novice. Hopefully, you should find it easy to follow. HTML's rapid success was due in no small part to this ease of use. It is also not a procedural language, though sometimes it is mistakenly called that. What Barksdale shows about HTML is that it is a declarative language. That is, you say that certain text should be written in a given colour or font style or size, and at a certain relative location on the page. You tell the browser what you want shown, and it has to implement that.

But Barksdale goes beyond HTML. As a display language, it is very limited. Whereas he shows how you can use JavaScript as a client side [ie. running on the browser] language, to perform actual programming tasks. JavaScript is a good functional complement to HTML, as you might appreciate.