Mastery of HTML

Recently I began to have great interest in developing web-site for professional reason. In my quest to find good books on Web Design or HTML related matters, I stumbled upon a book By Dick Oliver and Michael Morrison entitled "SAMS Teach Yourself HTML and CSS in 24 Hours, SEVENTH EDITION ".

In the introduction part of this good book, I like to qoute the given statistics of the internet users in 2005. The qouted text from the introduction section is as following.
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In 2005, it is estimated that approximately 900 million people will have accessed the Internet, including 188 million in the U.S. alone. Throw in 58 million Japanese users, 45 million German users, 35 million British users, 18 million Russian users, and 17 million Canadians, and you can see the meaning of the word "world" in "World Wide Web." Along with all of these people who use the Internet, there are also quite a few people cranking out new content for the Web. Although accurate measurements of the total number of web pages are difficult to come by, the popular search engine Google reports having indexed more than 4 billion web pages as of late 2005.

In the next 24 hours, tens of thousands of new web pages will be posted in publicly accessible areas of the Internet. At least as many pages will be placed on private intranets, where they will be viewed by businesspeople connected to local networks. Every one of those pageslike the 4 billion pages already online will use Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML. If you read on, your web pages will be among those that appear on the Internet in the next 24 hours. This will also be the day that you acquire one of the most valuable skills in the world today: mastery of HTML.

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In this fast moving world, there is so many things that we need to learn and learning the HTML language is IMHO, something that we should take very seriously if we are to compete with the more advance countries. I am not very sure how many internet users in Malaysia already know how to design a web page. As for me, I am one of those internet users who still lacking behind in this area and I am really feeling very bad about it already. Given the time and strength insha'allah, I will try to learn this important skill and not left further behind from the rest of the world !