Recommend web-dev book to me.

[Pxtl]

I'm looking to tighten up my HTML/CSS/Javascript knowledge. I'm a desktop developer who has been gradually moving into web-work (I code a lot of ASP.Net) however my knowledge is terribly informal.

As any coder knows, a platform is ten times harder when you're just learning from examples and have no knowledge of the formal rules and best approaches to do something. You do things by trial and error and Googling each problem.

Obviously, I need to fix this.

Anybody got a good book recommendation for coders wanting to learn modern HTML/CSS/Javascript properly?

[Sabutai]

http://www.w3schools.com/

[Jazcash]

Well I learnt the bulk of my knowledge from a combination of editing existing templates and Wordpress themes to see the effects, getting some first hand experience at school and then getting myself Dreamweaver which taught me more than anything else could teach me. Also, W3S helped a bit

Also, the Firebug addon for Firefox helped me understand HTML/CSS significantly.

Oh and I forgot to mention that car reap hair her also did his bit!

[Beherith]

+1 to w3schools, excellent site.

[CarRepairer]

Well I learnt the bulk of my knowledge from a combination of editing existing templates and Wordpress themes to see the effects, getting some first hand experience at school and then getting myself Dreamweaver which taught me more than anything else could teach me. Also, W3S helped a bit

Also, the Firebug addon for Firefox helped me understand HTML/CSS significantly.

And CarRepairer helped you too.

(CarRepairer gets his help from http://www.w3schools.com)

[AF]

Ditch WYSIWYG and tables as soon as

Csstricks.com is rather good, smashingmagazine has some good articles. Never rely on one source however, and a book will be out of date.

[Pxtl]

Yeah, I've been trying to ditch the tables - too bad so few browsers support the tables-as-div tags, because there are a handful of cases where tables still work nice (horizontal scrolling seems to be a good place for them).

I've been trying to learn all the business of floats and I've long-since dtropped the wysiwyg (the WYSIWYG tool in Visual Studio is notoriously sluggish and crashy anyways) but like I said, the problem I've encountered is a lack of formal knowledge... I'm often struggling with the resolution-orders of my CSS classes, the various ways to name CSS types and how they're applied (.myclass tr.foo) , the differences between the "official" HTML formats (strict, ect) and so on.

Most of the tutorials I see online are more about magic tricks (oooh, look how to make your divs gradually shaded!) and aren't about actually learning the language - I'm still digging through the W3Schools site, but I found that it kind of jumped the gap between "magic tricks" and "here's the formalized grammar in inscrutable syntax".

[AF]

Avoid mixing css with tables, tables dont play nicely in most browsers aside from stylign tables as data grids

[Jazcash]

Just like to say thanks to Pxtl for starting this thread cause I've started learning Javascript now

[AF]

Dont bother with javascript, learn jquery ;p

[Jazcash]

Dont bother with javascript, learn jquery ;p

After some quick research, I found that Jquery is a library for Javascript and Jquery by itself, without Javascript, is useless! Therefore, I have decided to learn Javascript and Jquery in conjunction with each other! I hope your knowledge has been aided in my research and I hope to speak to you again in the near future! ...

!

[Pxtl]

While jQuery is the biggest elephant, there are a _lot_ of similar tools, with different angles. MooTools, Prototype, YUI, Dojo, etc. jQuery has the best integration with Microsoft, but others have other assets. Stylistically MooTools looks the best to me, but ymmv.