This seems like an interesting resource for people who already work in the industry and know what the modern practices are. Having a historical perspective is interesting, and also know what best practices have stayed through the years. However, it's also important to know what simply isn't used anymore.
I'm not sure that this is a good resource for a beginner, because it would teach them practices that aren't just out of fashion, but altogether unused, and would hurt them in the job market IMHO.
Much of this text is now obsolete -- not obsolete like "oh, a new JS lib du jour came out yesterday and we should all adopt it", but obsolete like "if you use this, many browsers won't support it and nobody else in your generation will be able to maintain your code".
Specifically:
- DNS and HTTPS are way more complicated now than when this was written
- Mobile usability isn't done this way any more; WAP and XHTML are not in use
- VoiceXML is not used
- XML in general has largely given way to JSON. SOAP is rarely used except maybe outside of academia and other niches.
- RSS is pretty much dead
- The DOM structure is not as semantic as in the past (unfortunately)
- It presupposes that most data must live in a RMDBS as opposed to other storage paradigms
- It completely ignores (well, predates) the prevalence of abstracted cloud services that most web work uses these days, vs reinventing search etc. from scratch
- Analytics is likewise way more complex today, but in the post-Google Analytics era and in the post-privacy era
- Some of the HTML syntax it uses is deprecated
- It presupposes a simpler full-stack model where a small web team will do the entire full stack work from the UI to the DB admin, vs today where that's usually specialized and/or outsourced to various third parties and APIs
I hope this doesn't come across as snobby... just trying to give the OP some context about where this fits in relative to modern work. Some of the fundamentals are indeed worthwhile reading, but the text itself doesn't make clear what is or is not still relevant. Without prior knowledge to be able to differentiate that, this book could teach a bunch of deprecated practices.