Rating: 
Summary: A Good Tutorial if You Have Some Previous Web Knowledge
Review: Using HTML 4 Spec. Edition is an excellent tutorial and reference for the consumer who wishes to learn HTML. The only downside to this book is that you must know a good deal about web design already, not neccisarily HTML, but the overall idea of web design and publishing. I would recommend this book to most people who are interested in learning HTML.
Rating: 
Summary: Comprehensive, but often overly chatty
Review: You can read a book like this in two different ways: 1) as a reference 2) reading straight through.I found the style of the writing to be too casual to comfortably use as a reference. After awhile, I got annoyed by the author's overly-conversational tone when describing how things work (e.g. interjections of "Cool.") Reading straight through I found the examples too repetive. For instance: a 10 line excerpt is repeated twice within a paragraph, where only the first line differs. This happens again and again. In longer examples the waste of space gets much worse. I think the text and examples would be both easier to follow and more compact had there been more thoughful use of font and color. On the good side, the text does a good job of warning where incompatibilities exist between browsers. It also puts quite a bit of effort into giving the reader starting points for accessing additional resources.
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