What would be the best book for beginners to learn web design/codes?

I really suggest this book..
http://www.sitepoint.com/books/html2/

I have read it and suggested it before. It is great.

tizag.com was pretty helpful to me when I was learning. They use simple examples that are easy to follow. Once you get the hang of things, you can use w3schools.com, which in more in-depth and technical.

Maybe it is just me but I find myself copying and pasting from online tutorials I never learn why stuff does what it does. If I have to copy what is in a book I spend more time asking why it works. YMMV.

@drdoombot thats a great site, but a bit monotonous if I may say so myself. Also try htmldog.com as a reference for your budding web designer. Don’t get discouraged if you fail at it a couple times. A lot of times it’s just grammatical error and forgetting rules that catch me.

Thank you for the good advice. To all three of you. I already checked out all 3 links, and they seem pretty useful. Also the book looks great. I am seriously considering to buy it.

O’Reilly has a great line-up of books, and I found their HTML & xHTML guide and CSS guide to be extremely helpful resources when I was first learning. I would also echo @drdoombot‘s recommendation of w3schools.com for an online resource.