I would highly suggest you take the books one at a time and don't use them as references, learn it from start to finish by going from the beginning of the book on through. It will take you through a lot of examples, tutorials, and basically walks you through creating a site. Don't take the shortcut and use them as references, that makes more work for us here which is why I gave you the books silly!

Ok got it, i'm on page 38 right now and i'm finishing up with some school work, I definitely love the fact that you have found a way to keep me busy, books don't usually hold my attention but CSS the missing manual has me pretty much hooked

hehe yw and told ya that was a good one

...And the whole forum breathes a sigh of relief
You'll soon see how much quicker and easier things go when you have the fundamentals down.

Agreed, but maybe a bit prematurely...:

Yeah, Matt, I would highly suggest you get crackin' on that HTML and CSS stuff asap. Javascript and many of the other web coding languages such as jquery are things you learn "after" you learn HTML and CSS. I would highly suggest you talk with your instructors and make sure they are aware you do not have any background in programming yet, I find it very difficult to believe they would have thrown you into those programming languages without the basic fundamentals of HTML and CSS learned first. Not to smart of them if they did, not sure how your classes are setup and where you're going to school, but that's not how it is usually done. Usually you would have done HTML and CSS as prerequisites to most of the other web languages.