I picked up this book to understand more about text formatting so I could make "fancy" web pages. Instead it convinced me to concentrate on content instead of trying to specify font sizes, layout dimensions, and such. The HTML world is in a bit of turmoil from a specification point of view. The standard is moving towards Cascaded Style Sheets to handle fancy documents, but the majority of pages all use older inline formatting commands. In fact almost every line of the resume I exported from MS Word 98 contains a deprecated element. [Deprecated means the command is valid now but will be phased out]. Browsers will support everything for quite some time, but you end up with a book where a significant percentage of pages are discussing commands you really shouldn't be using. As a rule the book is up front about deprecated tags, but not about deprecated properties. What I mean by that is whether you find out a feature is deprecated in the first or last sentence of a paragraph. The book does a good job of pointing out just how much junk browser software will accept. Writing some code and then viewing it with Explorer/Netscape is not a good way to verify correctness. You definitely want an HTML checker. I use BBEdit and now I understand how awful my previous pages were. Eventually I will fix them all. Anyway, the book set me upon the righteous path, and if nothing else, I've settled upon my methodology and started adding content to my site for the first time since its inception. If you are looking for an HTML reference, this is a good book, but you will also want a book on Cascading Style Sheets.