Who Is this Book for?

If the title of this book caught your eye, you're probably already well acquainted with the ins and outs of the Internet's most popular offshoot, the World Wide Web (or perhaps you're just a severely confused arachnophile). To understand this book, you need to be familiar with HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). You don't have to be an expert, but you should know the difference between a <p> element and a <br/> tag. In addition, several chapters call for more than a passing knowledge of JavaScript. For the Ajax section, you can work with the basics without knowing how to program server code, but I will be referring to some PHP code used to process data on the server.

That said, the more knowledge of HTML, JavaScript, and PHP you bring to this book, the more you'll get out of it.