Open-thread: Must have HTML, CSS and JavaScript books?
If you were going to help friend get started with front-end web development, where would you start? Which books (or Video tapes / DVDs) would you suggest they buy?
Two of my picks: JavaScript: The Definitive Guide
And you?
I’d also recommend Stylin’ with CSS by Charles Wyke-Smith and HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS by Rachel Andrew and Dan Shafer.
No doubt it’s been updated but the HTML 4 Bible was unbelievably helpful to me. Hell, it was so good the person I lent it to, up and stole it. long story. Regardless, the book was easy to follow and instructive. As for CSS, for me, it doesn’t get better than Eric’s books. It just all makes sense coming from him.
I like the later editions of the visual quickstart HTML/CSS books as teaching tools.
For JavaScript, I can’t recommend DOM Scripting highly enough. (I’ve been doing this web thing since ’98, and for whatever reason could never get my head around JS. I read DOM Scripting last year, and it clicked.)
Joe Clark’s Building Accessible Websites is a classic, as is Don’t Make Me Think — for getting out beyond the basics.
Ah, yes, Don’t Make Me Think is amazing reading. I liked DOM Scripting, but I think I learned just as much by tinkering with the Mozilla JavaScript documentation, reading blogs, and searching Google.
Usually that sort of thing works for me — how I learned HTML, CSS, and PHP — but for some reason I had this terrible mental block around JavaScript. The book got me through the block so I could actually comprehend all that other stuff.