Product Reviews

Molly E Holzschlag is an instructor and media designer as well as an author, and apparently holds the accolade of being one of the '25 Most Influential Women on the Web', writing for such well respected sites as Builder.com. This is the sixth edition of Using HTML 4, and both content and structure are completely revised. It can now be used in a more linear fashion, which enables the reader to progress sequentially through the chapters and tutorials, although I found this approach made non-linear reference dipping rather more difficult than I'd like in a volume of 1,100 pages.

Unfortunately, that isn't the only thing I found difficult about the book. The numerous code examples, while always welcome, were amazingly difficult to read thanks to the typesetting used. Okay,

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I wear reading glasses, but my eyes aren't so bad that I have trouble with other books featuring code examples, so the blame must lay with poor design. Indeed, design matters are at the heart of most of my complaints about this textbook; it almost reminds me of those parish newsletters that the local village vicar used to knock out on his Amstrad PCW using a variety of fonts.

The book's even more difficult to read because it's written in the worst textbook style, over-complicating uncomplicated matters. The chapter on Color Concepts, for example, is full of jargon such as 'subtractive color' and 'additive synthesis' that serve no purpose other than to proclaim the cleverness of the author and her background in graphic design. The other thing I find difficult to accept is the user-level category, which is quoted on the cover as 'intermediate to advanced'. The advanced user will gain nothing from this book except a lighter wallet, while the intermediate user is most likely to come away muttering 'I knew that'.

There are better books out there for the beginner, including the author's own Teach Yourself HTML in 24 Hours, which leaves this one in the unenviable position of having virtually no niche to fill. If anyone is going to truly benefit from reading this book it will be the absolute beginner, or the designer looking to get to grips with HTML.