Comments about oreilly Creating a Web Site: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition:

I think the book has great topic for each chapter, however; it's so difficult to follow the step. It's bringing extremely frustration. It needs review. Plus I would like to see the video version of the book.

Comments about oreilly Creating a Web Site: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition:

Creating a Web Site: The Missing Manual, Second Edition Written by: Matthew MacDonaldPublished by: O'Reilly / Pogue PressReview Written By: Nathan Shinabarger I don't know about you but me, and almost everyone I know spends a great amount of time online. Have you ever gotten to that point and your surfing cool sites and your like, "If everyone else can do it why don't I?" See many people think about creating websites but it never really gets past the thought stage before they give up. If you would like to step outside the realm of "normal" and actually create a website, this is the perfect book to help you. This book covers all the basics of creating any type of site including some basic Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Another benefit of this book is unlike many books it is easy to follow and logical. Section One of this book covers planning for a website. It talkes about website hosting and also covers the very basics of HTML. This section is not that useful for the experienced power-user but great intro for newbies. It also offers a brief overview of HTML editing software. Section two covers many topics to make your website look better. This section includes basics in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), inserting: pictures and links, tables, and section covers. Although no truly in-depth material is provided in this section it is quite enough to get started with all of these things. This section does a good job of showing how to make you web site look good so that people come back. Section three goes into some depth and covers topics not even all web-developers know about. It focuses mainly on getting traffic including how to get search engine hits. It also covers putting ads on your site and message boards. This is rather helpful for advanced people yet still understandable by the novice. Section four show how to enhance your site with Javascript, audio and video, and buttons. This section was enough to get anyone putting audio (or video) all over there site but had a rather brief section on audio and video leaving out any details. This section was slightly scary yet gave the message not to over-do it and use moderation. Section five covered the popular type of site: blogs. In specific it covered working with Google's Blogger. It went slightly in-depth in this although they don't tell you how to create your own RSS feeds. It also shows how to edit the templates automatically provided for you to personalize. After the sections they had two helpful appendixes. Appendix one was very helpful on the subject of HTML tags. Appendix two covered the links offered throughout the book. They kindly give you links instead of a CD because it saves you $5. All the projects in here can be completed with free software, sure paid may help but hey free is well, free. In summary this book is a helpful reference tool and refresher for the advanced web-developer yet a good easy-to-understand book for novices. It is well worth the money once it cost. It is easy to use and will leave the reader able to easily create there own website without any paid-software. It has loads of useful information in it and will continue to be one of my favorite books from O'Reilly. I would highly recommend this book to anyone remotely interested in creating websites.

Comments about oreilly Creating a Web Site: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition:

I've been a professional software developer for longer than I care to admit, but only have been working with web technology for 3 or 4 years using ASP ASP.NET JavaScript AJAX etc. I've have a lot of holes in basic web technology like web hosting, domain names, minutae about the anchor html element and such. This book helped fill those holes.

Comments about oreilly Creating a Web Site: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition:

I'm a fairly experienced web editor who last created websites a number of years ago. Knowing that a lot has changed since then, and having never heard of XHTML, I decided to buy this book.

I was disappointed. To start with, the DOCTYPE example in Figure 2-4 (page 30) failed an online validation test; evidently it isn't "well-formed". Oh well; I can probably ignore that.

More disturbing was the fact that HTML tags were explained in a haphazard, hodgepodge way. The book should have a summary of all tags with all attributes and all values. Trying to find specifics is extremely frustrating.

All in all, this isn't a very useful book in my view. The manual is still missing.

Comments about oreilly Creating a Web Site: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition:

Okay...Just started reading the book. Was at Barnes & Nobel getting ready to read another book when I spied this one left there. I skimmed through it and was surprised! I had gone to a bookstore, tried to find a book for an ignorant person wanting to create a website. I didn't know squat. I also asked a salesperson there and no one was of any help. Being desperate as I was since I rented a domain & a "website" I wanted to know what to do with it. I bought the Dummies book out of desperation because I couldn't find anything else. I got through some of it and have never picked it back up. I really didn't understand and it didn't really seem to help me start from nothing. I believe it assumed that I already knew something. When I skimmed through this book, I had to purchase it. The book starts at the beginning or at least near the beginning of the book lets you know the things that I had to learn on my own and somethings I still didn't know. I like to learn things and I wanted to start from scratch on creating my website. I had bought all the bells and whistles and didn't need all of that....which is covered in this book. It has been easy to read and understand. I wish I had found this book at the beginning. I could have learned about FTP's instead of calling up the guy who rented me the space and complaining about that I couldn't get my stuff on my website. I also used the WYSIWUG (I think that is what the call it) and no matter how much I tried I couldn't get it to look like what I had in Publisher. I also tried to hyperlink to my other pages and couldn't. I also couldn't insert a Windows Media Player or add my montage. I have read in this book that I will be able to learn how and I now know why I couldn't link pages or why my web page didn't look like my Publisher did. I am really excited to read and practice what I am learning. Well, gotta go. Just wanted to let you know how much I am liking your book so far and will probably add another when I get through. Thanks!!!!!

Comments about oreilly Creating a Web Site: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition:

Book Review

Creating a Web Site, The Missing Manual

by: John Schuster

You know, I thought I knew html code reasonably well, for someone who is not in that business. However, it did not take long, going through this book, to learn that I was sadly mistaken. Yes, I could make my site say, "Hello World!" and call links and such, but much of the rest was beyond my understanding.

Let me say this about the book: It is not really intended to be read from cover to cover unless you're a total html novice. For those, who have any html knowledge, this is a reference manual. Look up your topic, in the index, and see what it tells you about that topic (usually a LOT).

One of the first things it helped me wrap my pea brain around was style sheets. What they do and how they work. Suffice it to say that they are neato. Additionally, I was having trouble getting some rows and columns of information to line up and appear in the desired order. The chapter on that topic straightened me out and, within about 20 minutes, I had it looking just like I wanted it to.

I'm not going to list all the chapters but this thing has 570 pages (not counting the index) and runs the gamut from the first "Hello World" page to integrating Java Script into your pages. It covers all sorts of lists, formatting, style options and even blogs. To say this is comprehensive is quite an understatement.

The truth is that it's going to take me months, perhaps even years, before I run out of useful material from this book.

Published by Pogue Press / O'Reilly

Web-Site: http://www.missingmanuals.com

Retail price: $29.99

Amazon price: $19.79

NOTE: Review originally published in the MPCUG Bridge (Memphis PC User Group), September/October 2009 issue.

Comments about oreilly Creating a Web Site: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition:

I am currently reading the Creating Web Sites book and am only on page 73. So far I am really pleased with the book, but am finding one thing somewhat annoying. Early on you pointed out what contributes to bad website design. I checked out the online examples and found that information was very helpful. Throughout the book there are large portions of text displayed in dark gray boxes and fairly light white print. The font size is pretty small and coupled with the dark background is difficult to read. (Some of us are actually over 40!)

For future printings, it would be helpful to deep six the dark gray boxes and present this text surrounded by a simple border if emphasis was desired. Shouldn't the rules of good web design also apply to technical manuals?

Comments about oreilly Creating a Web Site: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition:

There have been many good books written on web site creation over the years, unfortunately, most of them are now hopelessly out of date. This is because of significant changes in web site creation software, and continual browser updates, both for technical improvement as well as for increased security. The old HTML doesn't cut it anymore, and new elements such as style sheets, JavaScript and XML are now essential to produce useful web pages. We now have blogs, RSS feeds, streaming audio and video, and web conferencing. The most popular browsers, Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Opera, are continually being updated to keep up with these changes.

Author Matthew MacDonald covers all the new developments which are essential for creating up-to-date web pages, from creating your web site to finding the right web host. The book covers the use of XHTML, CSS, XML, creating blogs, using forms, and using software such as Front Page and Dreamweaver. The mechanics of adding graphics, links, videos and audio clips, and use of foreign languages is also covered. The appendices include an XHTML reference and a list of useful web sites.

At a hefty 587 pages, the book provides a comprehensive coverage of web site creation, and includes advice on connecting with your audience and how to make money on your web site as well. Anyone planning a new web site or updating a existing one would do well to get this book.