Learning Web Design, Sixth Edition: A Beginner’s Guide to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Web Images

Learning web design means understanding how a page is built, how it looks, and how it responds to the person using it. Jennifer Niederst Robbins’s sixth edition brings those pieces together in a clear progression, starting with the workings of the web and moving from HTML structure to CSS layout, JavaScript behavior, and web images.

For beginners, that sequence makes a broad subject easier to approach one layer at a time. Exercises and short quizzes throughout the chapters offer opportunities to put concepts into practice and check your understanding as you go.

Start with the structure of the web

The opening sections introduce how the web works and establish core ideas such as standards, accessibility, progressive enhancement, and responsive design. From there, the book develops HTML skills for organizing text, linking pages, adding images, building tables and forms, and embedding media.

Make pages work beautifully with CSS

CSS takes the lesson from content structure to visual presentation. Robbins covers typography, color, selectors, the box model, positioning, and animation, then explores modern layout tools including Flexbox and Grid. Responsive design ties these techniques to the challenge of making layouts adapt across devices.

Add behavior, then refine the images

The later sections introduce JavaScript, including functions, conditionals, loops, the DOM, and events. A dedicated part on web images addresses formats, optimization, responsive image sets, and SVG. The expanded JavaScript section includes contributions by Aaron Gustafson.

A practical learning path for web design

With its step-by-step scope, practice activities, and review material, Learning Web Design, Sixth Edition is suited to people beginning to build web pages as well as more experienced readers looking for a broad reference across HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and web graphics.