Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML in a Week News & Views Book Review

Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML in a Week Laura LeMay by Whitney Quesenbery, Technical Projects Manager Cognetics Corporation (Princeton Junction, New Jersey) Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML in a Week by Laura Lemay. Sams Publishing, 1995. 397 pages; $25. ISBN 0-672-30677-0. Originally published in News & Views September 1995 issue. Copyright 1996 STC-Philadelphia Metro Chapter. For permission to reprint this article, contact the Managing Editor.

When I decided to learn how to create a World-Wide Web page, I found lots of books about how to get on the Internet or browse the Web, and even more that dealt with the intricacies of UNIX, TCP/IP, and other imposing technologies. Few dealt with the nuts and bolts of working with HTML (HyperText Markup Language), the source format for Web pages. I've since found a number of sources of information on HTML, but Laura Lemay's Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML in a Week remains one of my favorites. Lemay's book is organized into fourteen chapters to be covered in seven days. A technical writer herself, Lemay clearly thinks of other writers as the audience for this book. She stays focused on page-making, and rarely digresses into technical discussions. Web page design Lemay begins with a brief overview of the Web followed by the design of a Web presentation. Rather than diving right into codes, she takes the first day to talk about what you might want to do on the Web, and how to get organized. What are your goals? Will your presentation be linear, hierarchical, or a web? What will be on your "home" page? What navigational options will you provide? Thumbnail storyboards, combined with screen shots of typical pages, help keep these chapters practical and useful. Lemay comes back to design issues on day five, after you've had a chance to learn more about HTML. She surrounds the basic lessons with practical design tips. HTML basics The next three days introduce the most important HTML tags, including paragraphs, headings, links, lists, rules, text attributes, and special characters. Lemay concentrates on tags that are currently supported by all browsers (HTML Level 2). Each section includes a good description of the tags with usage, examples, and design tips. Her examples are particularly good, pairing the HTML file with screen shots in both Mosaic (a graphical browser) and Lynx (a text-based browser). Each section also includes well-illustrated exercises. Day four covers images and multimedia. The section on using graphics and images is technically good, with the usual step-by-step instructions and examples. The book is a little behind the times with the current explosion of graphic pages on the Web, but Lemay's ideas and design hints are sound if you want a page that can be retrieved quickly on a 14,400 baud modem instead of one of the graphics-intensive, decorative advertising pages that are being designed today. The multimedia section covers the basics well, but predates many of the new browsers that have built-in multimedia capabilities. The rest of the book covers servers and advanced topics like forms, image maps, and gateway scripts. Although this is a good introduction to those topics, other books exist that cover them better. Keeping up Besides this book, you'll need a Web browser and an HTML editor. It's not much fun to learn if you have no way to practice, so listings of editors, browsers, and other resources are included in Lemay's appendix, along with a summary of HTML commands. One of the biggest problem with any book on the Web is that the print publication cycle is so long that the information tends to get out of date quickly. New authoring tools like the Microsoft Word Internet Assistant and the WordPerfect Internet Publisher give you HTML templates and automatic conversion so you can work in your own word processor. A new group of WYSIWYG authors has also just come out, like NaviSoft's NaviPress, which hide the HTML tags completely. Either of these solutions means that you do not need to know as much about HTML nuts and bolts. Even if you use one of these tools, it helps to know how an HTML document is built. For that, a week with Lemay's book will be well spent.

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Last updated: November 6, 1996 (wq)