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by didymospl 1870 days ago
Is there any good 'linear'(with a clear learning path, e.g. course/book, as opposed to MDN) resource to learn modern HTML/CSS? Preferably not one starting at Hello World. The thing is I'm primarily a BE developer but I have to do some front-end tasks every now and then and I often catch myself reinventing the HTML5 wheel.
4 comments

To build upon this question, more broadly: I'm also someone who's done quite a bit of HTML but it definitely isn't my day job. Finding good info is quite hard whenever I do want to make some site: most of the time I end up on reference pages but they don't give a good overview, whereas beginner's tutorials might have the piece of info I'm missing somewhere on the middle of part 7 (I don't have the patience for that). Searching for "modern HTML mobile scaling for someone who's about 12 years out of date please" doesn't quite seem to do it.

Does anyone have a good way to approach this? Or for HTML in particular, is there some way to keep up with it (on a decade time scale, not this year's framework hype)?

I’ve been skimming this book called “Learning Web Design (5th Edition)” and it does a good job at that by including sections on the big picture and long term trends.

Its author has been in the web dev field for decades and has written multiple books on the topic. She has got some chapters written by experts in respective fields (CSS by Eric Meyer and so on)

John Duckett's book "HTML & CSS" is good. You can skip to the more advanced chapters if you don't want to start from zero.

As much as W3Schools is hated, I find their HTML/CSS/JS guides to be a lot simpler to understand than MDN: https://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp

Thanks everyone for all the recommendations. I need more time to look into them but I just wanted to add here that the book you mentioned [1] stands out as one of the most aesthetically pleasing IT books I've seen.

[1] http://www.htmlandcssbook.com/

Doesn't necessarily mean anything, but I checked out the book on Amazon and see that: Publisher : John Wiley & Sons; 1st edition (November 8, 2011)

I am sure there are a lot of good stuff there, but quite a lot has happened with html/css and browser support since late 2011.

Not linear but I recommend: for HTML read chapter 3 & 4 of HTML spec - https://html.spec.whatwg.org/

For CSS I recommend Wes Bos tutorials about flexbox and grid - https://wesbos.com/courses and this blog: https://ishadeed.com/articles/

Thanks for the pointers!
YouTube, NetNinja had great courses that are real easy to follow.

Also read MDN often.