best way to learn web design

Bob Z

if i wanted to learn html or xhtml from scratch what are the best websites or resources or books?

yoyo

W3CSchools is quite good. Will move this over to development where it's better suited...

Nick

ChRoMe

yoyo wrote: »

W3CSchools is quite good. Will move this over to development where it's better suited...

Nick

W3Schools takes a lot of **** over its inaccuracy, however I do believe its gotten a bit better over the years.

The Oreilly "Head First" series of books are very good for the complete beginner.

bluecherry74

I found the Sitepoint books really good when I was learning. I worked through this one a few years ago and it's a good, practical place to begin:

http://www.sitepoint.com/books/html3

The Sitepoint website itself is very good as well and there are some excellent reference materials to read through.

If you think you'd do better with video tutorials, take a look at http://www.lynda.com There's a $25 monthly subscription fee but their stuff is good quality and covers pretty much everything.

If you want to be a professional web designer or developer keeping up to date with new technology and trends is very important, so once you've learnt the basics, start subscribing to web design/development related blogs. (If you're a complete beginner the articles might not make any sense, so probably no point in diving in until you understand the basic concepts!) http://www.alistapart.com and http://www.smashingmagazine.com would be good places to start.

spr1nt3r

Just a quick one off topic. I am doing something for web with Illustrator, just a simple About Me page without any hoo ha, would I be able to export it and use or would I need more tweaking after I am done with Illustrator (i.e. simple button press animation).
Thanks and sorry for silly question..

tricky D

ChRoMe wrote: »

W3Schools takes a lot of **** over its inaccuracy, however I do believe its gotten a bit better over the years.

I'll quote a previous post in relation to this:

tricky D wrote: »

While w3fools raises some issues, w3schools is still a good starting resource. Nobody said it was perfect and some of the criticisms are a bit too pedantic. It certainly beats the pants off most real world courses out there which cost an arm and a leg to learn out-of-date, product oriented and non-standard crap. The fact that w3schools has those kinds of errors shows how difficult the last few percent on the learning curve are. The only really perfect place is w3c itself, but if you've been on the standards development mailing lists you'll appreciate the imperfections that exist even there.

Tizag looks good.

yoyo

tricky D wrote: »

W3Schools takes a lot of **** over its inaccuracy, however I do believe its gotten a bit better over the years.

The Oreilly "Head First" series of books are very good for the complete beginner.

I know W3C has plenty of criticism, but it is the easiest starting point I know of for people looking to learn basic HTML/JS/CSS etc. online I know of. It also includes a useful "Try It" editor. Its certainly easier than the W3C's own website for beginners

Nick

stevenmu

There's also WebPlatform.org. It's a new resource backed by the W3C, Microsoft, Google, Facebook etc for web development.

I've only had a quick look over it, it's still a WIP and I don't think it's a replacement for W3Schools yet, but it's a pretty good resource to look at too.

Bob Z

thanks for the replys will check a few of these guides out. is there any resources that will work offline?

onemorechance

A quick google search brings up this free pdf.

http://www.tutorialspoint.com/html/html_tutorial.pdf

Right Click link and select "save as" to download.

emmabee

I found codecademy.com really good