How to learn HTML: 46 great sites, courses and books (all free)

How can you learn HTML today? For free?

It may be hard to get really good material for free but there are great resources to get you started:

To get started

1. HTML for Beginners – introduction from freeCodeCamp.

2. HTML (and CSS) from scratch – video course also from freeCodeCamp.

3. HTML for Beginners – quick guide from HTML.com.

4. The Ultimate Guide to HTML for Beginners – from Hubspot.

5. Learn HTML – course from Codecademy. Teaches the basics.

6. Learn HTML – course from Google. More fundamentals, by Google developer experts.

7. HTML course – from Study Tonight.

8. Free HTML courses at Udemy.

9. Learn HTML (and CSS). First 15 chapters and 120 lessons free, then pay.

10. Dive into HTML5. Old, some HTML history, but probably one of the best HTML websites/books out there.

11. Rote Learning HTML (and CSS) (source). Free ebook with all HTML elements, attributes and more. Useful if you love memorizing stuff.

12. The “best” books to learn HTML (and CSS). More books: free PDFs of a number of HTML books.

To look things up

1. HTML cheat sheet.

2. HTML cheat sheet. Another one.

3. HTML cheat sheet by Stanford University [PDF]. And another one.

4. HTML Reference. It gets bigger.

5. MDN Web Docs: Community site for everything around web development. Industry favorite.

6. W3Schools HTML: Some love W3Schools others hate them. Great resource if you love them.

7. The HTML specification. Some recommend to read it early, for others it’s too overwhelming. You pick.

8. Addendum: The HTML specification for developers.

9. The W3C HTML mailing list. Dead but with a lot of HTML history.

10. The HTML tags across specifications.

11. HTML tags and their meaning. W3Schools again.

12. HTML tags to try out. GeeksforGeeks.

13. WebGlossary.info: HTML (and general web development) glossary.

To dive deeper

1. 10 free HTML (and CSS) books.

2. Free ebooks on HTML at Freebook Sifter.

3. HTML5 Doctor. May be old.

4. Awesome HTML5. Many links. May be old.

5. HTML News. May be dead.

6. Developer News. Somewhat dead? But has some HTML content too.

7. HTML5 Rocks. Dead and old but has great context.

8. HTML5 Please. Dead but also useful.

9. HTML Ref. Dead? and even older but useful for historical purpose.

10. awesome-html5. Another historical reference with many additional resources.

To stay up-to-date

1. Smashing Magazine on HTML. Smashing Magazine’s articles about HTML.

2. HTML at A List Apart.

3. HTML at Frontend Dogma.

4. HTML at Sitepoint.

5. HTML articles at DEV.

6. HTML at Wired.

7. HTML on Hackernoon.

8. HTML news on Mastodon (frontend-social).

9. HTML on Glitch.

10. WHATWG (HTML working group) on X.

11. WHATWG on Github.

Please comment for more great and free HTML beginner material!