http://www.ComputerBob.com/reviews/review_html_xhtml.php .
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by ComputerBob
April 9, 2003
I recently read several glowing online reviews of a new book, HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide - 5th Edition, by Chuck Musciano and Bill Kennedy (published by O'Reilly). Almost everything that I read about it said that it was an excellent tutorial, even for beginners, because it explains everything very clearly. And that it would also be an excellent reference book, even for experienced Webmasters.
Because I'd like to eventually upgrade my entire ComputerBob.com Web site to XHTML, I bought the book from Amazon.com for $28.00 (U.S.D) with free shipping. All of my local bookstores sell it for $39.95 (retail price). It arrived late last week.
Today, I began using the 650 page tome to help me create a new Cascading
Style Sheet for a 
project
that I'm working on for a corporate client.
Or rather, I began to try to use it.
I found this book to be absolutely horrible, and almost completely unusable. I honestly have no idea why anyone ever gave it a glowing review.
With its long, dry, academic descriptions of HTML and XHTML tags, it's about as interesting as a statistician's doctoral dissertation. And all it does is describe each tag. It doesn't tell you what the syntax for each tag is; it doesn't list all of the options available with each tag; and it doesn't even give you any examples of how to use each tag. Its Cascading Style Sheets sections suffer from the exact same problems. After spending 3 (extremely frustrating) hours in it today, I finally gave up and went to several Web sites that I'm familiar with, to study their Cascading Style Sheets for hints about how to create my own.
In my opinion, HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide is a complete failure, both as a tutorial for beginners, and as a reference for experience Webmasters.
So, what did I get for my $28.00, other than 3 hours of frustration?
I'll let you know if I figure out a reason to not throw this book away.