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HTML5 for web designers is the first book from A Book Apart, a new publishing company specializing in writing brief books on various web topics. All those books are about 100 pages long, laser focused, covering only essential topics. This book, written by Jeremy Keith (author of DOM Scripting, that I reviewed here), will guide you through the hot new stuff that HTML5 offers and how to harness its power from now on. Covered topics include a brief history on HTML markup, the design of HTML5, rich media (canvas, audio & video tags and the different options, …), the new features of web forms (new types of inputs such as calendar, sliders, …), semantics (microformats, new HTML5 tags such as header, footer and nav, content models, outlining, scoped styles, …) and finally how to use HTML5 today with an introduction of the different tools and libraries to help you out in this task. |
Pros
- Great idea to write brief and laser focused books. This is a change from the traditional bibles of hundreds (thousands sometimes) of pages taking decades to digest
- Very interesting introduction to HTML5, covering essential topics and explaining how to use them already based on current browser support
- Full color book
Cons
- Quality of the book itself (cover paper) is pretty poor. The thinness of the paper makes it a book that gets easily damaged
- Currently available only from A Book Apart. Took me 3 weeks to get it from NYC to Belgium
Conclusion
Very interesting book for web developers and designers planning to learn HTML5. Be aware that, due to its very small size, this book is rather an introduction than a course. A good starting point before digging further into HTML5. Would be great if the quality of the paper and distribution channels could be improved.
