Reader's expertise level should be...?

[Charles McGuire]

Hi Rusty -

I've read the reviews at Amazon. There aren't many; the three are by "professional" reviewers, hardly customers like us (at least not like me). I'm trying to understand for whom the book is targeted.

For example, James Stewart (who was sent a copy of the book by the publisher) said this:

In general I suspect the key audience for this will be IT departments inside large organisations tasked with refreshing or extending an intranet.

Would you agree with that?

To put it another way, I work for a medium sized company in a very small IT shop (only two developers, both of us pretty green). Most of our applications are web apps for internal users. Would you say this book is targeted for someone like us? We have only a few apps on line and are more interested in getting new development done right than refactoring an existing monster code base that doesn't exist (yet).

[Elliotte Rusty Harold]

The books is very much targeted at experienced professionals, not newbies. However within that range I think developers working on all sorts and sizes of sites can get a lot out of it. 10-page sites can have the same problems as 10,000 page sites. (It's just a little easier to fix the 10-page site by hand.)

Even if you're starting with a green field web site or application, Refactoring HTML will teach you a few things to do and a few things not to do, so you can avoid having to refactor the site ion the future. :-)