Most of the major topics that one needs knowledge of in order to start creating Web pages are presented in this book. It is particularly nice that it deals with both cascading style sheets (CSS) and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), as well as browser-specific issues, all in one place--such as in chapter 9. Thus, experienced Web developers as well as beginners can use it as a reference.

However, the book would be even better if it included a modicum of detail when dealing with some of the technical matters related to Web development, which are likely to be confronted by its readers. For example, the treatment of common gateway interface (CGI) scripts is rather bare, and there is no mention of applets, servlets, or server-side includes (SSI). The treatment of JavaScript is scattered across different sections and chapters, and nothing is said about Web programming in Perl and Python. The back cover of the book claims that this book “doesn’t overwhelm you with waffle, theory, or obscure details,” but, it seems to me, knowing something about how to avoid using unsafe scripts--a lesson many webmasters have painfully learned--does not count as “waffle.”

There are a few relatively inconsequential factual errors in the book; for example, in “A Brief History of the Internet”:

The term Internet was coined in the 1980s, which also heralded the invention of Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), the networking software that makes possible communication between computers running on different systems.

Not only is TCP/IP not software, it can also be traced back to the 1960s, not the 1980s.