Mostly because I love Kathy Sierra’s Creating Passionate Users blog and have heard much about the style of writing in the Head First book series, I ordered Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML as soon as it was released. (Ok I also got it because CSS is a paticularly nasty time-sinkhole for me when I’m working on anything web-related.)
I love the book, but for me it was too much of an introduction to HTML. Skipping ahead to the later chapters, I did learn some important things about CSS. Discounting that, the book is great. It’s sarcastic conversational tone keeps you engaged in the material, it has great examples and frequent special sections that break up the flow nicely.
This book is especially well suited for people entirely new to HTML- I’d definately recommend this book for that audience. The pacing is so well thought out, almost anyone could learn HTML here.
I enjoyed the parts I actually did read so much, I ordered Head First Design Patterns (taking advantage of my “free” trial membership in Amazon Prime) because I never quite got through the real Design Patterns book.