William M. Pegram
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Introduction to HTML and Web Pages
Northern Virginia Community College, Alexandria
Community, Corporate and Workforce Development
William M. Pegram
Friday, September 16 and 23, 2005 - 1-4PM

Course handouts: Web Page Design Introduction

Recommended Text: Oliver, Dick and Morrison, Michael Teach Yourself HTML and XHTML in 24 Hours, Sixth Edition, 2003, SAMS, ISBN 0-672-32520-9, $25. Amazon link

The emphasis of this course is on HTML.  Books I would also recommend, consistent with that emphasis, are the following:

Maran, Ruth Teach Yourself HTML Visually, IDG Books, 1999, ISBN 0-7645-3423-8. $30.  Lots of pictures.  Students liked it in my semester length course.  Amazon link

Meyers, Paul F., The HTML Web Classroom, 1999, ISBN 0-13-796111-1, $70.  This book was used at NVCC Annandale in semester length HTML courses (IST 128 and 129) for several years through summer 2002.  It's a good exposition of HTML and well-written.  The disadvantages are that it has a few typos, it is expensive, and hasn't been updated. Amazon.com link

Niederst, Jennifer Web Design in a Nutshell, Second Edition, 2001, ISBN 0-596-00196-7, $30.  An excellent reference book.  This book is probably a better reference book than teaching book since it doesn't have many examples.  Also it covers a wide variety of topics, so it doesn't go into certain topics, particularly JavaScript, in much depth.   Amazon.com link

In addition, there are some other books out that I haven't reviewed but which might merit a look: Niederst, Jennifer Learning Web Design, Second Edition, O'Reilly, 2003, ISBN 0-596-00484-2, $40 and Willard, Wendy HTML A Beginner's Guide, 2001, Osborne, ISBN 0-07-213026-1, $30.


Popular free places to host your website include Tripod and Geocities.  Tripod is affiliated with Lycos and Geocities is affiliated with Yahoo so if you have a username on Lycos or Yahoo, you can use this for your web space on Tripod or Geocities.  Both sites will place ads on your site.  Unfortunately Geocities no longer permits FTP to their free accounts so I now recommend Tripod.

Tripod provides 20MB of free space and supports Front Page Server Extensions (a few features in FrontPage require FrontPage Server Extensions)..  Your website on Tripod will be http://members.tripod.com/username where username is replaced by your username.  Once your account is set up on Tripod, you do not need to use their tools to create a site, but can immediately start FTPing your pages to the site. 

Revised: September 15, 2005, comments to William Pegram, wpegram@nvcc.edu