This book easily meets the authors' goal as a "hands-on practical approach to learning how to build Web pages." Although the text begins with a straightforward explanation of why XHTML exists and its differences from HTML, most of its content explores particular markup topics such as frames, multimedia, style sheets, and scripting. Readers who follow the numerous examples closely will soon find themselves implementing the syntactical rules of XHTML, even if they are used to regular HTML code.

Plenty of tips and detailed explanations of important concepts distinguish this book from many of the other HTML books on the market. For example, the authors take the time to explain some of the subtleties of image size optimization like running solid colors horizontally in GIF files to maximize compression. Another quite useful example shows how to use JavaScript to pass data between separate pages in a frameset.

Tons of highlighted code snippets and screen shots illustrate the material, and the detailed blow-by-blow commentary gives the book a nice flow. If you're looking for an HTML tutorial, forget it and pick up this forward-looking XHTML title. --Stephen W. Plain