Murach's HTML and CSS, 5/e

What this book does

This book gets you going with HTML and CSS as quickly as possible and then builds out your skills in a professional way. To make that manageable, it’s divided into four sections.

Section 1: The essential concepts and skills

This book starts with an 8-chapter course that shows you how to use HTML and CSS to build websites. This course works for beginners as well as experienced web designers. And the last chapter shows you how to use media queries and scalable images to implement Responsive Web Design (RWD) so your pages will look good and work right on any screen, from phone to tablet to desktop.

When you complete this section of the book, you’ll be able to develop web pages at a professional level. Then, you can go on to any other section or chapter to learn new skills whenever you need them.

Section 2: Responsive Web Design

The two chapters in this section show you how to use Flexible Box Layout and Grid Layout to provide RWD for web pages and portions of web pages. These are CSS modules that enhance what you learned in section 1, and every professional web developer needs to know how to use them.

Section 3: Other skills as you need them

This section expands on section 1 by presenting the other HTML and CSS skills that you’ll need on the job. That includes:

• More on how to work with images, including how to provide images for varying viewport sizes and how to work with icons, image maps, and image rollovers
• When and how to use tables, including how to make them responsive
• How to work with forms and the HTML validation features
• How to add audio and video to your pages
• How to use custom fonts, a skill that will make the day for your graphics designers
• How to use the CSS features for transitions, animations, transforms, and filters

Section 4: Web design, deployment, and JavaScript

Once you have a good grasp of how to develop web pages, you can better understand what you’ll do before and after you write the code. That’s where the 3 chapters in this section come in:

• Chapter 16 shows how to make you websites more effective by focusing on users, usability, and the established guidelines for web design.
• Chapter 17 not only shows how to deploy a site on an Internet server, but also shows how to get the site indexed by the major search engines.
• Chapter 18 shows how to add JavaScript and jQuery features like image swaps and slide shows to web pages...without knowing how to code JavaScript and jQuery.

Who this book is for

This book is for anyone who wants to develop web pages at a thoroughly professional level. That includes:

• budding web designers and developers
• web developers who need to expand and enhance their skillsets
• JavaScript programmers who need to know more about the HTML and CSS that they’re scripting
• web developers who use Content Management Systems and discover that they desperately need to know what’s going on behind the scenes

What's new in this book

At long last, HTML and CSS have come of age, so there are no significant content additions in this edition of the book. Besides that, all modern browsers support all of the HTML and CSS features, so browser compatibility is no longer an issue that needs to be addressed.

That left us free to focus on simplifying and improving every chapter so you can learn faster and better than ever from this book. We’ve also printed the book in full color. That’s a change that’s been requested for many years...and we agree: color makes many of the skills easier to understand. It also makes this book an even better on-the-job reference.

The only significant content change is that the book now shows you how to use Visual Studio Code (VS Code) as your text editor. That’s the text editor that has become so popular for all types of program development, including web development with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. And chapter 2 provides a tutorial that shows you how to use it for HTML and CSS.

Why you'll learn faster and better with this book

Like all our books, this one has features that you won’t find in competing books. That’s why we believe you’ll learn faster and better with our book than with any other. Here are a few of those features:

• If you page through this book, you’ll see that all of the information on each topic is presented in “paired pages,” with the essential syntax, guidelines, and examples on the right page and the perspective and extra explanation on the left. This helps you learn faster by reading less...and it’s ideal for quick reference, too.
• To show you how HTML and CSS work, this book presents the code for complete websites that range from the simple to the complex. We believe that studying the code for complete websites is critical to learning...and yet you won’t find applications like ours in other books.
• This book also presents dozens of short examples that let you (1) master new skills in manageable bites and (2) look up information as you need it. And our paired pages make it much easier to find the example you need than it is with other books that embed the examples in the text.
• At the end of each chapter, there are exercises that give you hands-on experience by letting you practice what you’ve learned. These exercises also encourage you to experiment and to apply what you’ve learned in new ways…just as you’ll have to do on the job.