Book Recommendations Wanted

[intellect]

Decided to order a few books about web design and development. I would like some genuine book recommendations of books you read that were really helpful for the following topics:

• Joomla - Beginner level
• CSS/XHTML - Beginner level

[Keynes]

Top books I've used: http://oreilly.com/

Learning by experience is the most effective route, however.

[MAllie]

I think that Elizabeth Castro's HTML, XHTML & CSS is absolutely the best I've come across for explaining the whole thing, and others on the forum have said so before in other threads.

[intellect]

thanks brad and monica for your input. i agree that doing it is what really teaches you but nice to have both online and offline references as well.

[draggar]

Originally Posted by MAllie

I think that Elizabeth Castro's HTML, XHTML & CSS is absolutely the best I've come across for explaining the whole thing, and others on the forum have said so before in other threads.

I'll second that in fact, most of the "Visual Quickstart Guide" books are great.

[Doc Com]

My Joomla library:

Joomla! A User's Guide: Building a Successful Joomla! Powered Website (Paperback)
by Barrie M. North

Beginning Joomla!: From Novice to Professional (Beginning from Novice to Professional) (Paperback)
by Dan Rahmel

There are more but they are not worth the waste of paper they are printed on.
These are two I refer to most often and are very thorough.
They deal primarily with Joomla 1.5 and you might as well start with this, being the latest secure release.

Please do not waste your money on the many others books listed on amazon. I have. So consider this fair warning.

Look for Joomla User's Guide from the Joomla.org site. I printed this out (free) and bound it. Very detailed info.

Also, Joomla!: Visual QuickStart Guide is a new release (Nov 21) and most likely is worth a look.
Traditionally these are some of the better editions for learning.
I would also look at those titles for your other requests as well.

Additionally, the Head First series are good, the Teach Yourself series, and someone already mentioned the O'Reilly.

The releases by a company called Apress (see second title listed) are typically very very good and have become some of my favorite Beginning editions.

The Dummies Series are mostly Dummies Wasting Money and have been a big disappointment for hands on learning.

And the Amazon links are NOT affiliate links.

[ftaylor]

I'd have to say the friendsofed range of books are top notch; they are written by "web design celebrities" if you want to put it that way. HTMLDOG is an excellent book (and website - htmldog.com) for learning (x)html, by Jeremy Griffiths (owner vivabit.com). CSS Mastery by Andy Budd is an excellent CSS book (at a more advanced level).

[Doc Com]

Found a couple more last week (FREE) that are PDF format which appear to be very good;

http://djoomla.com/component/option,...c,select/id,9/

These will help with Joomla and what to do afterwards.

I downloaded the CompleteGuideToSEO.pdf

There are a few for Joomla Templates and installation as well.