If you have ever been a fan of any of the “For Dummies” books, you’ll know why HTML for Dummies might be one of the best places for a newbie to web design and HTML coding to start. For starters, although the title might have “For Dummies” in it, the books of the series are anything but condescending. They often make complex and comprehensive amounts of information easy to understand, and often with a slight twist of humor thrown in for good measure. The books in the “For Dummies” series are often written by experts in the field, and contain well-designed and structured layouts, presenting information in easy to grasp blocks that can be understood one at a time, rather than just throwing a thirty page chapter on a single concept at you and hoping you don’t get bored halfway through.

Like other books in the “For Dummies” series, “HTML For Dummies” this book is authored by experts in the field, and is considered to be a very good place to start. While getting instruction in HTML via online tutorials is certainly doable, indeed one can learn basic HTML via these tutorials, eventually the user will want to purchase a book, if only to avoid having to surf to a multitude of webpages to understand how to do one thing, and then another page to understand how to do something else. A book can be easily flipped through, even highlighted, if need be.

Quite a few professional web designers got started with this book as their first book, only moving on to more advanced books later on. The only real complaint about the book is that it doesn’t really go into detail about how to use the HTML, only how to code it. It is one thing to be able to write the code in an editor on your computer, but if you are completely new to web design, you might need a helping hand walking you through the process of saving the code into an HTML file that will be uploaded to your domain server.

To this end, the third edition of the book comes with a software CD with tutorials and programs designed to get the newbie web designer up and running, as well as HTML templates to copy and modify to help get you started. The newer versions of the book do include more information on uploading HTML files via FTP servers to your domain.

This book was truly written with the beginner in mind. It might be cumbersome to those who already know some basic HTML, but if your HTML skills are weak or could use some improvement, this is the book for you.