Creating a Website: the Missing Manual by Matthew MacDonald
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This book is a decent introduction to many topics related to web design; too many topics, in my opinion. I expected the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but a large part of the book teaches how to use Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, and other sites and services, which seemed beyond the scope of building a website. It also covers website promotion (including SEO, analytics, and community-building), monetization, and multimedia.
The book is full of clear, understandable code snippets and screenshots. It presents HTML5 throughout, and encourages the use of new HTML5 structural elements in place of divs for more semantic markup, with caveats about browser compatibility. I was pleasantly surprised by how much space was given to JavaScript, and really liked the JavaScript 101 chapter.
