This book is a great book for learning HTML and XHTML coding. The writing is informative and easy to understand. The illustrations provide great examples to learn from. The author also recognizes his preferences and does his best to share other points of view. Before getting the book, I had done a fair amount of coding from templates, and this book helped me fill in my knowledge gaps. I haven't read much of the CSS chapters, but they seem easy enough to understand and thourough, but I don't have a need for CSS.

This is a good basic introduction to HTML and CSS. It doesn't cover everything and the format of the book (text description on the outer half of each page and sample code and images on the inner half of each page) gets a bit tedious. However, it gives reasonable exposure to most of the HTML components and how they are affected by style specifications. This is no substitute for an HTML/CSS reference book, but one can find plenty of that on the internet.