A lot of reading on the preliminaries of HTML and shows you the ropes of doing things around HTML. Due to this, the chapter is very easy and straightforward. (How appropriate!) However, this chapter foreshadows a systemic issue of a certain economical PDF copy of the book: the teletype font (TTF) code blocks that are "quite long" (i.e., supposed to wrap down to the next line, if you use a GUI text editor) often run off into the right margin, instead of being wrapped properly down to the next line...
This systemic issue can be partially "fixed" or ameliorated by examining what the output is supposed to look like in the pictures of the Figures for Hands-On Exercises (assuming they are 100% correct -- a few of the towards the end of the second half of the book, Chapters 9-14, have "incorrect" pictures in Figures that most likely correspond to older editions of the book).
Since this is the first chapter using the JavaJam website assignment that lasts for the rest of the course, the JavaJam assignment is easy. In fact, the book literally tells you what to type. Appropriate, but this only lasts during Chapters 2-4.
You are told to be aware of some other markdown "languages" XML and XHTML (which are considered to be "old", but you may still come across websites that still use these), but you will work with HTML5 exclusively in this class.
This is where there are "motifs" throughout the book, some exercises will return to "mini businesses", such as Trillium. It is a bit corny and fun in a way. I suppose it is to help you learn. Not necessary, though I think this may be helpful due to something in psychology - even if these businesses are fake.
Interestingly, this is where I learned that making clickable URLs that say "Click here" or "More Info" is really not a good practice for accessible web development. It took a while for that point to sink in, but I eventually started to apply this whenever I post links on Reddit or making links in Markdown. (Besides, if your URL contains underscores, then you need to escape each and every underscore in the display text of a link in Markdown, which can be tedious if there are many underscores - Reddit links have lots of underscores, as an example. This shows that learning accessibility in one language pays off when you learn another language that piggybacks off the ideas of the parent language: in this case, Markdown inherits these ideas from HTML.)
Besides, your online messages will now look a lot neater, without bare URLs sticking out everywhere. (I know that sometimes it can be preferred to show the whole URL, but that comes from malicious and/or spam e-mails or messages. The internet was never created with a lot of privacy or security in its early days, which ended up being rather painful afterthoughts down the road. Regardless, we are going to assume there is some semblance of trust, from the creator of the web content creator, and also from the user, who should make sure that at least the link is not sketchy by using the mouse hover technique.)