HTML, XHTML, and CSS Bible

I bought a dutch translation of this book, and was rather disappointed. I wanted to learn more about xhtml, to be able to work on my own website, and not having to ask a friend for every little change I wanted to make. In my opinion the book clearly lacks good editing work. For instance on parts where certain elements are introduced, the authors start elaborating on styles. This complicates things a lot, because explaining styles should be reserved for the chapters that are devoted to it. Where it says in the first chapter that layout and content should be separated, they give examples where there is layout mixed with the content. This doesn't make it easy to develop my own writing of html. The meaning of document type definitions didn't become clear to me, because they use different type definitions throughout the text. So as a beginner I can't follow any more... I'll do my best to go learning with this book, but if you still have to decide which one to buy...