LincolnBlogs

Ahh yes, another book review. I have to say that most books I review end with me telling you that it’s a good book, but this is NOT the case this time. This is not a good book, it’s a fantastic book!

I consider myself pretty versed in HTML 4 Transitional code, but HTML 5 is a whole different monster. I looked at it a while back but it wasn’t very mature at the time. Things have changed a bit now. There are more browsers that support it now and the support is much better. More and more websites are offering great HTML 5 content and there is some really amazing stuff I have seen it do. I just had to get my feet wet a little more.

This book, the HTML5 Developer’s Cookbook, is a great way to get into this new form of web programming. I really dig the whole “cookbook” concept, which has some well annotated and defined “recipes” for accomplishing different tasks. You get great directions on everything from HTML 5 basic layout, to HTML 5 forms and much much more. This book starts with some forward information on what HTML 5 is and what it is not, a little history and background. It follows with, basically, 2 sections. Practically half the book is devoted to straight HTML 5 layout, tags, element changes, forms, css and media embedding, and the second, more advanced half of the book covers a wide variety of very useful API’s. Things like drag and drop support and SQL support all the way up through really advanced things like media capture and geo-location.

It took me a long time to get through this book, mostly because i really wanted to try a bunch of this stuff myself and there are a lot of code examples (those recipes again). What I *WISH* I had done is to read the back few pages first. You see, a great advantage to this particular book is it comes with a free 45 day access to Safari Books Online copy of the book and it is infinitely easier and quicker to cut/paste code from the book than for me to type it all 🙂 My only gripe would be that you only get 45 days with it. That should be sufficient enough, though, for you to build a personal code repertoire that you can revisit for long after.

As always, it seems, with the selections I get from Pearson, this would be a great buy, fantastic resource to have and is a very good read. Go get your today. You’ll be glad you did!