Introducing HTML5

64 points by buddhika 14 years ago | 16 comments

jacobbijani 14 years ago |

The code samples linked at the bottom have surprisingly poor formatting and indentation.

salimmadjd 14 years ago | |

and the example links are directory listings. I don't think this site is ready for public yet and someone posted it too soon.

bphogan 14 years ago | | |

This book has been out since 2010. They beat mine by a few months.

adamrmcd 14 years ago | |

It's funny, I recently published an HTML5 book, and can say that in the book itself this problem is largely caused by the publisher and their space contraints. So much copy text and code samples get cut just to "make it fit" in pages divisible by 16. Pain.

However code examples that appear on the book's site obviously have no such constraint, and as such may just be formatted as per the author's personal taste. Either way, no one is happy :)

Speaking of the book itself, it's not bad. Though I thought they glossed over the Canvas too quickly, and could have spent more time on helper libraries, like jQuery, etc.

bphogan 14 years ago | | |

It depends entirely on the publisher.

For my book, 80 characters was the line max. It was difficult for a few JavaScript things, but it just meant breaking one-liners apart into two liners, or breaking long script includes appropriately.

prophetjohn 14 years ago |

I own the first edition. It's a decent, high-level overview of the changes since HTML 4. It assumes that you have a good understanding of CSS and JavaScript also. However, I don't know CSS or JS and I still learned quite a bit from the book based on the fact that I understand programming concepts in general to have a decent idea of what the JS code is doing.

Overall, the first edition was a little lean on content, but I saw today that the second edition was out and is about twice as long, so that may be improved.

lewisflude 14 years ago |

I was given this book last Christmas. It's a great overview of HTML5's features. I also met Bruce Lawson in London earlier this year. Definitely worth checking out.

zobzu 14 years ago |

There's a lot of HTML5 books, yet the standard is a draft, and new drafts to that draft come weekly.

Now, I'm not saying the books aren't useful - they are.

But it's about time to make it a standard and work on HTML5.

It's what _forces_ browsers to all have a very short development model, btw.

RyanMcGreal 14 years ago |

How does this compare with Mark Pilgrim's Dive Into HTML5?

cfq 14 years ago | |

I own and read both books. Mark Pilgrim has a more straightforward approach and his book seems to be more about getting things done. I usually use it to get ideas whilst working on an implementation or use it as a reference.

Whereas Introducing HTML5 is a great read and gives a lot of background information about certain design choices. It also covers almost everything. It's my favourite HTML5 book.

As for one last comparison, I think a newcomer would find it harder to follow Dive Into HTML5 but you get sucked into Introducing HTML5 really fast. In a couple of chapters, it gives you enough to start playing with this new thing you've learnt.

anujkk 14 years ago | |

I'm not going to judge a book by its cover. All I can see here is list of chapters and some links to related projects. Unlike Dive into HTML5, there is no free online html version of book here. May be someone who have read it can tell it better.

However, I found these resources on html5 to be very informative.

http://slides.html5rocks.com http://studio.html5rocks.com/

bprater 14 years ago |

I learned absolutely zero from this. No free chapters to review. It feels like blatant promotion. What am I missing here?