To be honest, I really didn't WANT to write a good review of this book. In my experience a book that does anything to overview the WWW does itself and its readers a disservice since reality will make it quickly out of date.

Surprisingly, the "Astronomer's Computer Companion," written in late 1999, is actually aging well. A good majority of the web sites it references still do exist and are helpful. Jeff & Ron's writing style is easy to understand and also easy on the mind without crossing the line into outright fluff.

This book is most useful for the armchair astronomer who has good access to a computer and the internet and who doesn't want to waste a lot of time aimlessly going through search engines. Jeff & Ron have done the work for you and again, surprisingly, the work still stands up well even in the face of a very quickly changing field.

They did a very credible job with a rather difficult environment to work with.

For anybody with an interest in astronomy, and owns a pc or mac, this book is a must have. At first, I thought it would be rather "dry" reading. But, I soon found it to be written in very easly understood language that even a laymen like myself could understand and enjoy. It has a wealth of info. on web addresses on almost any aspect of astronomy; I was amazed at how many there are! And, it has lots of pictures of stars and galaxies, which I personally like.

It's about time this book was published. There are so many really neat things an amateur astronomer can do with his computer. This book finally explains what and how a desktop computer is an astronomer's best friend. The included CD has some great programs and the book is a wealth of URLs and WEB addresses for all sorts of things astronomical. If you're into astronomy and have a destktop (Windows or Apple) get this book!

This is a great book that covers a lot of what you will need to know programming wise for web design on older browsers in HTML 3. We still largely use HTML 3 even today, and this book still has much relevence, however, some parts of this book are written for the much older mosaic browsers and are out of date. For a more up to date book, see the HTML 4 version of this book

I picked up this book as a newbie in HTML programming. After reading this book, I am able to do things I never dreamed of. These guys lay out questions people have in HTML and then go right over them, discussing exactly how to do it. I found it as a wonderful Beginner to Intermediate book. It's also a very awesome reference book, it doesn't completely rely on all of the code that's in the book. Very nice book. I'd recommend it to anyone that wants to learn HTML.

It's a good book for beginner to cover all basic idea and skills in differnet case. But for the advance user, it might be not enough and need to find other books. I cannot find some advance methods that I need in this book and also found some demo cases were not work as it said. But still it is a good book on hand.

I have not read the complete book, but it has given me answers and soloutions to all questions and problems I have so far been faced with. The book's ability to give straightforward, practical guiding to any problem, is for me as a fresh HTML-consumer rare and welcome in the jungle of HTML-related literature. It gives me inspiration and eager to go on!!

I have found the book quite wealthy in its contents but the accompanying CD was a complete failure... most of the more "complex" examples had to be fixed in order to be readable by IE4.01 or NS4.05. I liked the editing but the author gave topics like JavaScript, and gave only several basic concepts of the scrippting language although there was code in which he used JavaScript code which couldn't be understood without additional resources. But practically it's a good reference for beginners or those who only want to know the basics. I would personally suggest, in order really to get somewhere go for "HTML 4.0 unleashed Professional reference edition".

I received my copy just a week ago although i have been doing html programming with javascript for almost 2 years now. i had some good books that helped me move on to html 4.0 though i had some unsolved problems and... walla it solved me most of them. it doesn't cover javascript,dhtml and css well enough but it is definitely inclusive about anything from within the scope of the html 4 specification :)

PS better rework could have been done starting at changing

to..

The authors of this book have done an excellent job at writing for the complete beginner. Clear and concise instructions provide an easy way to learn the basics. The book also dives into more complex subjects like DHTML and javascript. The CD included is not very good if you are the cut and paste type person because a lot of the code on it does not work. Besides, you learn and retain better by writing the code yourself. Don't install the CD, just explore it and get the free applications it has, such as Mapit!, an image map maker. I've had it for almost a year now and have bookmarked almost every page. I still find new stuff when I reference it.