French at school

Just thinking of all the years spent learning French at school, in hind sight, the teaching of an HTML equivalent would have been much handier than been able to order coffee on the rare occasion that I venture over to France. I am now up to my neck in books on HTML, CSS, DHTML, XML, SQL, PHP, Actionscript, Applets, Apache, Linux, Javascript.....to name a few! 'Teach yourself HTML in ten minutes' was the title of the last one. Took me that long to read the first page and let it sink in...only 300 pages to go...300 x 10 = 3000 minutes. I make that just over two days if I don't stop to eat, sleep and.....