I spent a lot of time at Barnes & Nobles with a pen and notebook (most of them had a starbucks and newer book editions than my local library). I miss the consolidation of the information and explained what was going on and why while working in a linear fashion. I ended up using the same SQL book for almost a decade (1998/9-ish), kept finding something new in there. I don't miss the 1500+ pages and lack of cmd-F; on the other hand, I gained mad index parsing skills I never got in school.

I eventually found what I needed online, but I do remember working out of a copy of HTML for Dummies that I bought at the college bookstore. (1996 is when I got started)

There were always O'Reilly books, which is where I tried to learn HTML.