Instruct: Classify Amazon reviews into positive or negative sentiment
Query: excellent reference, but just a good tutorial

I read the book from cover to cover with the intention of learning HTML this way, but what I found was that the reference qualities of the book made doing it this way painful. Because it is a reference, I found myself slogging through a lot of repetitiveness in various tag explanations. I could cite from memory now the section on every tag explaing the lang and dir attributes. This is critical for a reference that needs to be thorough and consistent and not assume that you've read through the entire book as I have, but makes using it as a tutorial inefficient. I read Elizabeth Castro's HTML book afterwards and found it a much better tutorial (and still a fine reference although not as thorough). Bottom line: if you want a tutorial, get Castro's book - it's a bit simplistic at times, but you'll learn what you need to know a lot faster. If you need an excellent reference, then get this book as well.