Learning HTML and CSS is easy.  Or at least it seems that way to me.  This series of books is excellent for beginners.  Non-fiction is notoriously hard to read, and while I wouldn't say this was a page turner, they managed to engage my interest through 550 + pages of code.  Impressive!

You can follow along on your computer, and by the end, you'll have a very impressive site with some pretty neat layouts and capabilities.  They have EXCELLENT online resources.  I'll never be going back to the Dummies series of books.  These authors aren't kidding, beginners should go "head first" and you'll...