Welcome, then, to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript All-in-One For Dummies. This book gives you a complete education on the technologies that enable anyone to craft professional-looking web pages. You learn how to set up the tools you need, how to use HTML and CSS to design and build your site, and how to use JavaScript to program your pages. My goal is to show you that these technologies aren’t hard to learn, and that even the greenest rookie web designer can learn how to put together pages that will amaze their family and friends (and themselves).
If you’re looking for lots of programming history, computer science theory, and long-winded explanations of concepts, I’m sorry, but you won’t find it here. My philosophy throughout this book comes from Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux operating system: “Talk is cheap. Show me the code.” I explain what needs to be explained and then I move on without further ado (or, most of the time, without any ado at all) to examples and scripts that do more to illuminate a concept that any
verbose explanations I could muster (and believe me, I can muster verbosity with the best of them).
How you approach this book depends on your current level of web coding expertise (or lack thereof):
As I began updating this edition of the book, the world was awash in posts and talk and endless speculation about artificial intelligence, to the point where it seemed we’d soon be welcoming our new AI overlords. That’s not likely to happen anytime soon, but AI is here to stay and has already established itself as a significant part of many people’s workday routines.
I’ve been as enamored of ChatGPT and its ilk as the biggest AI boosters. I use AI for entertainment and curiosity, but I don’t use it for work. That is to say that not one word of the text, code, or examples used in this book has been generated by AI. Everything you read here is, for good or ill, the product of my warped-from-birth brain.
