The GOOD: The 'notes' section of each entry provides very useful information, reflecting the author's expertise.

The BAD: This is a very difficult book to navigate - to find what you are looking for. Have the designers of this book heard of <h1> or <h2>? How about color? Or something more than "PART I" along the edges? I found I have to go to the index almost every time. You should hold this book in your hand and see the inside before buying it to decide if navigation will be an issue for you.

THE UGLY: The lists of 'Attributes' and 'Events' make the book very bulky, without much use for me. This would be OK on an online reference, but in print form, it does not seem as usable.

I am relatively new to web page implementation (I hesitate to call my current level of competency "web design.") This book, is not meant as an instructional book but is an excellent reference book. I know what I want to accomplish, but I don't know what the correct term or syntax is to give that instruction to the browser in either HTML or CSS "language." It doesn't go into programs, such as Dreamweaver. It probably assumes you are writing code in a text editor, which I'm not. I do use Dreamweaver and have other reference books to explain the program specifics. I use this book as a supplement that saves me a lot of hunting around in drop-down menus or entering keywords in the help menu.

When I get stumped as I plod along, I simply refer to the super-extensive table of contents or, failing that, the index or one of the many appendixes. I find an alphabetical list of elements, their meaning, and a page reference for further information. The exact same list is available for all CSS selectors. In the text section, the syntax is demonstrated, the values are explained, and the term is defined. Simpler terms have shorter explanations; longer and more complex terms have longer and more detailed explanations. (Look in the Amazon "Look Inside" option for this title. Go, page by page, over the index and table of contents and you'll see what I mean. This was what convinced me to get the book in the first place.)

Yes, there are pages of text explaining web standards, general and specific rules for HTML, XHTML, and CSS, the peculiarities of browsers, markup language and many other topics. But these are also found in other books. The absolute strength of this reference is the clear and logical presentation of the terms that we need to invoke in order for a browser to understand our intentions. For this to happen, it helps if we know how to write what we want and the correct way to write it.

This is my first experience with "The Complete Reference" series, and I am very impressed. I am new to html and css, and this book provides a fine introduction to both. The book has a nearly perfect balance of teaching content and reference. I read enough information to learn the basic syntax, and saw many examples of usage. Then, the reference starts; you know how to use them, here are all of the options - go for it! Now when I need to know how to do something, say positioning in css, I just look at the options, decide what I need, and test it. It really is that simple. The html and css sections are separate, but both are explained in the same format. Now that I have a basic understanding of these topics, and a great reference, I am free to move on to more advanced topics like Javascript and MySQL.

This is also the first book that I have seen that includes HTML5 and CSS3 coverage (all of the others are currently pre-order only). The coverage lists everything, but only goes into detail on the tags that are most likely to be supported, or are already supported. Since we are a couple of years away from seeing the new standards adopted, this coverage seems appropriate.

This is the type of book that I can really learn from quickly, and I hope I find more that are this good for other subjects.