As a person who already has some knowledge in html, I have found the book to be useful, if not entirely what I was hoping it would be.
The book starts at the entry-level of web development and through the course of the book adds to your knowledge base with each proceeding chapter. Chapters go over important features, as well as defunct features you might run into if your looking at the source code of someone else's site and some features that have no function now, but are expected to be useful for the next version of web browsers. For the most part, the information is good though from time to time you will get descriptions that would only make sense if you had played around with web development before.
The book also has the annoying habit of mentioning a feature and then saying "But you'll learn all about that in chapter " which becomes annoying after you've read this and similiar lines for the 20th time. There are also some exercises where you'll find yourself using features the book hasn't gone over yet, but fortunately, it tends to talk about it a little later in the same chapter.
The Appendices in the back do a reasonably good job at grouping everything you've learned for quick access, but often forgets to provide decent details so if you don't remember certain things about an XHTML element for example, you'll find yourself having to flip through the index and rereading that section of the book.
I would recommend this book to someone who is an intermediate web developer or someone with some experience developing websites, but for someone who is a beginner, I'd suggest looking around for a different book.
