Lesson 1 assignment:

Look up the topic of screen resolution in the Google search engine at www.google.com. Try a few variations, such as "screen resolution" with and without quotes surrounding it, and with and without terms such as design and Web design accompanying it. (You're likely to find yourself using Google many times to get help on Web design topics.) Read some of the articles you find, then decide what screen resolution you want to target for the next Web site. Write a few sentences supporting your decision.

Hint: Take your audience into account—the more technically-oriented the audience, the better the case you can make for targeting a higher screen resolution.

I did a Google search with:
all the words: "web design"
exact phrase: "screen resolution"
terms occur: in the title of the page
and read these articles:

YourNew.com's article Resolution Explained contains a feature that lets you check out your webpage at different screen resolutions. It suggests preparing for 1600x1200 resolution: "This is not the most common resolution in use, but be sure your site is ready. With 19 and 21 inch screens with low dot pitch gaining popularity, higher resolutions are becoming more common." This site uses a width of 700 pixels and suggests staying "under 760 pixels to avoid excessive scrolling for your low resolution viewers." Of course, this article ends with a sales pitch ...

Southwestern Missouri State University's article Deciding Screen Resolution This mentions that your background image will tile when viewed at a higher resolution than you designed for, but is not a very detailed article.

Web Design 101 article Screen Resolution says 52.1% of users have screen resolution of 800 x 600 (but doesn't specify where this figure came from or when).

First Web Site Design's article What screen resolution should be used? The author prefers to use 1280 x 1024 but recommends designing for 800 x 600 (and even suggests leaving a small margin so users with a resolution of 640 x 480 won't have to do too much horizontal scrolling).

The above article links to National Cancer Institute's Web Design & Usability Guidelines. The screen resolution article is here and recommends 800 x 600.

Blue Leaves Web Design Resource says you can use table width="100%" to fill the screen, but you have less control over positioning of elements; suggests using width of 600 if aiming for a 640 pixel screen or 750 if aiming for 800, to make space for the browser's scroll bar. So there was no definite recommendation here, and the author didn't bother to spellcheck "miscellaneous," which appears in a nice large font on this page.

I also came up with several ads for web design services and some message boards.

The Myth of the 800 x 600: I think this article, or one with a similar title, was in the Supplementary Material for one of the Intermediate Web Pages lessons, but I didn't save the lesson properly so I can't be sure. This article proposes "Instead of absolute positioning of page elements designers should use relative positioning. This allows a page to contract and expand to fit a variety of viewable browsing areas."

Conclusion:
So ... if I had to pick a fixed resolution I guess I would go with 800 x 600. It would be a good idea to experiment with different views and relative positioning (which might work well on some sites and look awful on others); since I'm a newbie I guess I would have to experiment. (Clearly I should also read more articles!) For my homework assignments so far I have tended to specify size for images, but not table width.