Are you a print designer working on the Web? An HTML coder learning about server-side hosting for the first time? Web Design in a Nutshell has slim but whole chapters for those topics-- and everything else you can imagine.

Written in the popular "Nutshell" format, this guide is full of helpful tables and lists, making it a perfect desktop reference. The book breaks down the huge topic of Web site development into understandable, readable segments: the Web environment (browsers, displays, design principles), an in-depth guide to HTML tags, graphics manipulation and display, multimedia possibilities, and technologies for larger site management (such as Cascading Style Sheets [CSS] and XML).

While this book is certainly comprehensive, the abundance of information could be overwhelming to someone just starting out with HTML. In addition, the heart of this book is filled with technical specificity on Web page creation (for example, a section under "Graphics" is titled "GIF87a versus GIF89a"). Readers looking for more conceptual explanations of Web design and layout would be better served with other titles. But for day-to-day development and maintenance, Web Design in a Nutshell is a truly well-constructed toolkit.