Visual Start Guide : HTML for the World Wide Web (4th ed)
by Elizabeth Castro
Publish by Peachpit Press (ISBN 0-201-35493-4)
If you want to get to grips with HTML then this is an excellent starting point. After a brief and interesting intro it gradually takes you from the “Hello World!” stage to forms, using cascading style sheets, and beyond. It even covers promoting your site. I liked the section on hiding selective dividers on tables using <table border=1 rules=area>, which was a new one on me. A quick look in the appendices tells me that this is ratified under the HTML4 standard and should work with almost all browsers.
Overall, I can heartily recommend this book to anyone interested in writing their own web sites.