Rating:  - Not for the beginner
It staggers me that this book has received high ratings from so many people. Good luck if you're a beginner trying to learn HTML and CSS from this book. Before you even see so much as one HTML tag, the author leaps in to talking about the W3C, cross browser issues, HTML extensions, the web standards project, CSS workarounds, XML, markup languages, is XHTML dangerous, the difference between serving a page as XML or XHTML, text content, the identical properties of XHTML and HTML (just in case you're wondering, no, we still haven't seen a working example of a HTML tag yet, and we are now on page 27), elements, attributes, values, elements containing other elements, empty elements, tags, hex colors...
OK! Now we have seen our first few tags. But oops.. rather than receiving a proper introduction, the tags shown are merely displayed in side columns, to assist in making points about "attribute pair values" and layout.
And so on we go hearing about Uniform Resource Locators, block vs inline, parents and children (still no proper introduction to our first tag), plug ins, helper applications, file names, absolute and relative urls, web accessibility... and on to page 40 which gives theory about DOCTYPES, standards and quirks mode.. now here's some theory about building web pages for an intended audience, saving web pages, creating default pages, editing and organisng files (page 52, still haven't seen our first tag), how to get web design inspiration, more on DOCTYPEs, character encoding, the HTML and HEAD tags.. what's this?! Oh my gosh! Page 58 and finally the HTML tags start getting introduced!
I'm sorry, but this is garbage. If I don't have a solid, working understanding of HTML (which I don't, hence why I bought this so called guide to "learn" XHTML and CSS), then there is NO WAY I am going to have the *FAINTEST CLUE* what the author is talking about in those first 58 pages. NONE.
Here is something along the lines of what I was hoping to see, perhaps no later than about page 3:
Type this in to your text editor, and save it as myfirstpage.html:
Hey! This is my first web page!
Now view it in your web browser. Now put some tags around it (explain what a tag is, and what h1 means), now save again, and view in your web browser. See how the text has now become more enlarged and prominent? That's because the web browser can see the tags around your text, so is now displaying your text as a heading.
THAT is how you introduce someone to HTML.
In summary:
If you're a beginner, stay as far away as you possibly can from this book. It will probably turn you off trying to learn HTML and CSS.
For the intermediates, the best this book will do is act as an occasional reference for ideas you already have some knowledge of. It is only for this reason that the book was saved from receiving a 1 star rating from me.
Rating:  - good book for beginner, like me
Although not every page of material is useful for me, it is a good and easy book to learn html. Author also has her own opinion from time to time. CSS is popular and the mainstream, yet traditional style tags are still useful.
Also, I won't buy it if it isn't a good book which got tons of good reviews already, so don't need to say more.
One thing I am not aware of before is, for the input data, we will need php to process the data, which is another big topic. I am quite disappointed at this, since I do want to play with input data on site.
Rating:  - HTML, XHTML & CSS by Elizabeth Castro
This text is well written and very helpful. The problem with it is that I had difficulty seeing the type. I would be better for me if the type was a dark black.
Rating: - Great Resource for the Bookcase
This is a great book, highly resourceful and useful to have around. I didn't read it cover-to-cover (but plan to eventually) but it's a good read and a great introduction. It's written to be quick and easy to pickup with lots of sidebars of extra information which is much appreciated.
Rating:  - Good beginners book for those new to web design
I purchased this book I believe about two years ago when I decided that I wanted to learn about web design. I had good previous experiences with Peachpit Press in particular their Visual Quickstart books so I naturally looked for an HTML book from this series. Fast forward till now and I've been able to create a few interesting web pages from what I've learned and certainly HTML For the World Wide Web was certainly a good start. My impression of Ms. Castro is that she is one of those rare people who are not only good at their subject matter but also very competent in effectively teaching it to people from different levels of experience.
Please note though that as I said its a good book for beginners but you'll quickly outgrow it once you get a feel for the basics. I recommend that you purchase, "CSS Mastery: Advanced Web Standards Solutions" within three months from when you begin reading this book. My analogy of these two books are this: Ms. Castro's book is a course in using all of the tools in the carpentry shop and doing small projects. The CSS Mastery book is like then taking an apprenticeship under a master carpenter to build some really nice things with the basic skills that you previously acquired.
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