Planet TLLTS

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!

The last time I relearned HTML was in the HTML 4.01 Transitional days, so I was excited to get my hands on some information to help me play with HTML 5. Let me first say that this book assumes that you have some frame of reference for HTML and is probably better suited for someone with a little familiarity, rather than a complete noob. With that in mind, I thought the book did a great job of covering not only the things that have fallen away from HTML, but the new things in HTML 5 as well. There are *plenty* of examples posted throughout the book to help not only keep you interested, but provide practical code snippets for you to use s well. I think the topic itself is fascinating and this book has quickly become a dog-eared reference for my exploration. In fact, the only real negative that I found is there is a lot of javascript in the book, which probably deserves it’s own book, or at lest it’s own chapter. Either way, I feel this book is well worth the price. It certainly has come in handy for me!

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