Honestly, trying to learn HTML from a printed manual in the late 90s was way more confusing than today's interactive courses. | Coding For Beginners - Free To Speak
Oh man, my friend got one of those manuals and it might as well have been in another language. He spent a whole weekend just trying to make a basic page work. Now he sees those interactive things and just shakes his head.
My old copy of HTML for Dummies had a whole chapter just on table tags. The best way to learn back then was to find a site you liked, view the page source, and copy chunks of code to see what broke and why. You had to mess up a lot to figure things out. Those interactive courses today basically do that trial and error for you, which is way less painful.