Lucian Marin
Learn HTML and CSS easily
I often see articles like Getting Started with Web Design where the author recommends reading a few — not exactly small — books, even for something as easy as learning HTML and CSS.
My advice is to learn by shipping, a point taken from Steven Sinofsky’s recent blog, Learning By Shipping. I want to take that challenge one step further and say that you can ship by learning. Get the tools professionals use, then start delivering hand-made, high-quality code without learning anything upfront. It seems impossible, but it is not. It is how a child learns to walk: nobody teaches them how, they just do it, over and over again, until it becomes second nature. If you have learnt about the “p” tag, go ahead and make something useful with it — say, a few paragraphs inside an HTML document.
My recommendation is to use Firefox with Firebug, because they are the most verbose and easy-to-learn developer tools available — and the ones professionals actually use. Keep in mind that “View Source” might be your first step toward getting familiar with the tags inside HTML documents, and with #IDs and .classes for styling them with CSS.