From: danny@cs.su.oz.au (Danny Yee) Date: Thu, 06 Jul 1995 21:32:58 +1000 Subject: Book Review - Creating Cool Web Pages with HTML title: Creating Cool Web Pages with HTML by: Dave Taylor publisher: IDG Books 1995 subjects: computing other: 244 pages, floppy disk, index _Creating Cool Web Pages with HTML_ is a fairly slow-paced introduction to HTML for the ordinary user. The approach is pragmatic and practical, designed to get the reader writing HTML as quickly as possible. Most of the book is devoted to basic HTML, but there is a whole chapter on the Netscape extensions and one on HTML+, image maps and forms/cgi-scripts. As well as the nitty-gritty of how to write HTML, Taylor provides some good hints on style. He also includes two great chapters on how to register your new pages with the various Web catalogs and search engines. Though it comes coupled with the source for the examples used and a Windows browser on floppy (none of which I have looked at), _Creating Cool Web Pages with HTML_ is almost completely platform independent. It assumes that the reader is editing raw HTML (oddly enough, it never explains why this is actually preferable to using some clever "what you see is not what other people will get" HTML editor) and that she has the information and resources needed to actually put her newly created pages onto the Web: there is nothing about setting up an http server or how to use an Internet access provider's. The section on cgi-scripts is very limited, but since the book is clearly aimed at people without programming experience that is quite understandable. Some advice on how to organise a large collection of web pages sensibly might have been useful, but that's something one learns fast enough. All told I think _Creating Cool Web Pages with HTML_ is a well thought out book which will make many peoples' first efforts with HTML considerably more pleasant. -- Disclaimer: I requested and received a review copy of _Creating Cool Web Pages with HTML_ from Dave Taylor and IDG Books, but that is my only connection with it and them. (Well, maybe I'd better confess to being a long-time elm user too.) -- %T Creating Cool Web Pages with HTML %A Dave Taylor %I IDG Books %C Foster City %D 1995 %O paperback, floppy disk, index %G ISBN 1-56884-454-9 %P xix,244pp %K computing Danny Yee (danny@cs.su.oz.au) 6 July 1995 ------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright (c) 1995 Danny Yee. Comments and criticism welcome ------------------------------------------------------------- URL http://www.anatomy.su.oz.au/danny/book-reviews/index.html -------------------------------------------------------------