I just got dreamweaver 8 and luckily that takes care of saving files in xhtml format. I'd still like to learn ait about the actual code, are there any good guides you's reccommend???

XHTML and HTML: The Definitive Guide is the only book I've ever read on the subject. I think it has pretty much everything you'd need to know.

XHTML isn't all that much different than HTML. It's not a completely new language. If you make sure to use lower case for all your tags and also make sure to close all your tags you've got a good majority of it already. There is more to it, but those two things will be a lagre percentage of the change from html to xhtml.

Dreamweaver doesn't provide accurate mark-up though, so you are better off going to learn it. You don't need Dreamweaver to save things in XHTML format

Personnally, I learnt HTML first. Then the transition to XHTML was easy as I use to use lowercase and CSS formatting anyway (no font tags).

Several tags in XHTML have been deprecated, things like <b> and <i> are replaced by <strong> and <em>.

You can learn xhtml from www.w3schools.com/xhtml/default.asp