Chapter 26, "Flash and Shockwave" explains what it is, advantages and disadvantages, introduces you to the Flash interface, adding a Flash file to a Web page, and integrating it with other technologies. Flash is a whole different animal and the book gives you the big picture of how it fits with designing Web pages. The following chapter on SMIL covers the same basics.

Part V addresses the advanced technologies including JavaScript, DHTML, XML, XHTML, and WAP and WML. It's useful to have these all close together at the end of the book to help you figure out which you may want to use for a Web project.

As useful as special characters can be, I never remember what to type to make the symbol appear, though I know these now. Finding the special character chart is the only complaint I had from the original edition and not even the index helped me find it, so I had to tab the page. This has now been remedied with one of the best improvements of moving the special character reference chart to the appendix for speedy access. Other appendices in the book are listings of HTML tags, attributes, deprecated tags, proprietary tags, and CSS compatibility and support.

As your design skills and knowledge grow, there is always a question that prompts you to open the book and get your answer. Highly recommended. If you need an absolute beginner's book, start with Niederst's Learning Web Design (this is a review of the first edition - it's currently in its second edition).

Hide your gadgets! Meryl has no willpower around them.