hi it's more useful to learn HTML and CSS. You'll be very happy you did. Tizag.com has some pretty good coding examples to get you started.
This one is very useful especially for beginners, and it has some css too. http://www.amazon.com/XHTML-Sixth-Visual-Quickstart-Guide/dp/0321430840
w3schools.com is better used as a reference. When it comes to how-to books, I've always preferred the "Dummies" series.
Honestly, the best way to learn is trial and error, you can go and read all the theory, but in order to become a successful designer, you have to implement and play around with new ideas and the best Book there is Google! Just google-it!
You can learn most web stuff online but if you really need a book, I'd suggest HTML 4 for the World Wide Web. It's part of the Visual QuickStart Guide series which is quite good for learning something from scratch. The one buythatscript suggested is also part of that series but covers xhtml and css as well.
This is the best HTML online tutorial because the details are complete with examples. http://www.w3schools.com/tags/default.asp enjoy
http://www.web-design-wiki.com its like Wikipedia with lessons in all web site designing tutorial HTML, css, php, java script and much more its in an easy and professional way
If you can not still find it on w3schools.com try to google it. Why buy books if it's free on the net
There's a lot of books that could help you in this, some are online like W3Schools... But if you like a unique, enjoyable way of learning HTML you should buy a book or donwload an ebook of HTML for Dummies...
Yeah - I like online tutorials too. Because I can copy and paste their code examples to experiment with, and it saves transfer and typing that a book would require.