Recommended book for newbies...like me

After busting my brain trying to get a grasp on HTML/CSS, I bought the book "used" - Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML. It is listed in the Beginners Resources Forum.

This book is really helping me get my mind around this stuff, in a sequential order. Glad I bought it!

That's great! I needed a book also. As great as all the links online were, nothing helped me like a reference book with tutorials.

Have fun!!

Thanks for making the recommendation... I think I got started with the wrong book, and was looking for something different to try. This just might do it.

I really don't know why people bother buying books when there are a million tutorial websites
I love w3schools, if my printer worked I'd just print that off and read it

The online tutorials are a great way to learn, but I find a good book is a handy reference if I just want a quick reminder on how to do something. It can be quicker than Google searching an answer sometimes. Also, books will often give you more of the background on something than a tutorial will which can help with the understanding.

I guess. I'd buy a book on ajax as long as it wasn't stupidly priced.
I've seen books on html prices at £20, stuff like that I don't see the point.

The books in my experience typically do a better job of explaining, with lots of visuals as well as side bar notes. So when you read it, you thoroughly understand how. Often online a tutorial will show you how but not always will they explain why something is done. Plus it's really time consuming to search google and look at 5 crappy examples before finding a good one.

To each his own right!

Hmm i find searching quicker.
you can't perform a search query on a book,
you have to do it manually
and in terms of accessibility.
if it's a large chunk of code.
you can copy and paste it.
with a book you have to type it all out

Its called an index...

You learn by doing, if your just copying and pasting your not learning your using their code.

Books take you step by step through the entirety of what you are wanting to learn so you learn it in order, leading from simple to complex.

A online tutorial will tell you what to do but woin't explain why - it won't explain the principles making it harder to port your learning to a different example. When you leanr the "why" rather than the "how" you can then appply it to every situation. if you just learn the "how" often you have to look for a new tutorial for each different application even though it may be very similar code.

Well said Alex... I completely agree.
My book of choice was CSS the Missing Manual... by the way!

we should put a poll
books or online tuts

I find if you just copy and paste code from a website, yes it will work, but where is the fun in that. If you are typing form a book then I would say 9 times out of 10 you will make typing mistakes which in turn leads to having to find errors which in turn leads to a better understanding of what you are trying to achieve.

Poll

Vote away!

Well you shouldn't be copying and pasting anyway. You should be working through each line learning what the different bits do. So you should definitely be typing it by hand and like has been said when you make little mistakes then you have to go back and make sure you've closed the tags or defined the variable correctly or whatever.

Also most web related books today come with a cd or have the files available for download. Most of the friends of ED books have this option and they publish some of the best web books available.

And as a side note, if you have traditional study skills then scanning a book for information isn't really that much of a problem. I think reliance on google to find information is your problem here not that the book is poorly laid out. It's far easier to find info from a book; they have titles, contents pages, chapters, sub-chapters, appendices and to top it off and index. SO even if you don't quite know what you're looking for you can find the related section and that will often answer your questions. Beat that google!

Pete.