Comments about O'Reilly Media HTML5: Up and Running:

The book is easy to follow and understand. I was looking around for a book to get me (html/xhtml programmer) into HTML5. I found it hard to find a book for me. But this book does the job.

I also like the reference to other resources that deals with the things he just wrote about. I noticed that I did not like to read the book without internet access. cause I use the links he provide in the book all the time.

But the links in the book that points to he's own stuff seams to be broken all of them. I get pages like "Gone. change your ref... bla bla bla".
And the link to the blog that he reference the whole explanations in the first chapter is "Gone"!!!

Anyway I just think the persons that want to learn HTML5 (beginner or not) should use this book.

Comments about O'Reilly Media HTML5: Up and Running:

Hats off to Mark Pilgrim, his nifty little HTML5 books does get you "up and running" in no time. This is a great starting point for HTML5.

That said, I found two major digressions
- How are standards are made (even the author points out this is a digression) - this one is somewhat related and can be skimmed.
- Video Encoding - as this is a book on HTML5, a pointer in the Further Reading should have sufficed.
I personally think these sections made the reading "awkward".

As I can't use HTML markup in the review, I had to avoid using data-vocabulary.org/Review/ microdata :)

please note that I have received a review copy from the publisher.

Comments about O'Reilly Media HTML5: Up and Running:

If only a few words were the key to opening up immediate production in HTML5. "HTML5: Up and Running" is one of few books that comes close to explaining that path in the least amount of words.

Some people don't care about HTML, no less HTML5. Some people are wearing the new badge of HTML5 code right out on their sleeves. Like the W3C.

They are so excited - they commissioned a slick, sexy HTML5 logo website while waiting for the final HTML5 tablets to come down from the mount… on the way to us... some eon from now.

The ease of this new markup is exemplified in the comfort that the binders of books, as well as the web authorities, feel in allowing us all to dip our hands in while the batter is still being stirred on HTML5.

'HTML5: Up and Running' from O'Reilly.com is not afraid to dish it out in economical slices. In the speedy evolution of technical web publications, 'Up and Running' is a mid-step to larger, more verbose books that are just hitting the market. Released early enough to be modest in page quantity but dense enough to explain all the essential aspects, a cheeky dash of humor is included inside for free.

Myself, as a communications designer, I am very happy with the way charts and diagrams are designed consistently through the book. I love the horizontal comparison charts that measure browser compatibility. The design helps to distinguish this information from the stacks of code throughout the text. As an illustrator, I'm dying to get HTML5 Canvas carved into my brain cells. This is a good introduction to forming images via markup but I need more visuals to really know how that happens outside of the flattened page. I'm reading the book in bound and PDF formats. Great advantages to the copious hyperlinks in the PDF format. Bound version is small and easy to slip into the bag for educating yourself on the fly.

efitzsmith.com

Comments about O'Reilly Media HTML5: Up and Running:

HTML5 Up and Running starts with some history, gives details about how to sense the level of the browsers support for different HTML5 features, as well as information about many of the features. Some of the key new features covered are: the drawing canvas, audio/video, geolocation, local storage, off-line caching of pages, as well as form additions.

This book is well written and does a good job with what it is trying to do. This book brings up many of the new features that are added with HTML5 and gives enough details to get the reader started playing with the features. In some areas there is quite a lot of detail, but the reader will want to use examples and details on the web to augment the book when programming.

The book is not an HTML reference. It just covers what is new in HTML5 so someone new to HTML should not expect to come up to speed on HTML with this book. For readers, like myself, who are familiar with HTML and want to get an understanding of what's new with HTML5 this book is a good fit.

Comments about O'Reilly Media HTML5: Up and Running:

Mark Pilgrim, author and organizer of the website Dive Into HTML5 has also penned a book about the topic published by O'Reilly Press entitled HTML5: Up and Running. The book, as it is named is designed for web developers to give them a good jump start into HTML5 and all of the promising API's and tricks which it promises.

After reading the book, I can certainly state that I know a lot more about using HTML5 than I did when I started. This is fantastic for me in light of the fact that my parent site for this blog, not the blog itself, is written in HTML5 and now I have tons of ideas for re-writes. The first three chapters of the book focus on what prompted the new version of HTML and how we got here, as well as the basic, including the new tags and the reduced requirements for composition.

The next 4 chapters dive into the gory details of the , , and tags, as well as local storage. These middle chapters are certainly not for the faint of heart. There is both a ton of theory here and there are a lot of ways to circumvent browser support or the lack thereof.

The final two chapters focus on forms and the future of extending the overall API. Both of which are interesting and poorly supported.

Overall, I really enjoyed the book and learned a lot from it, but I wish he would have placed the forms along side the canvas, audio, and video coverage. I also wish he would have spent more time in the construction possible, like HTML5 Doctor. However, if you want to learn about this and start using it right away, here is the book for you. Grab a copy today. No wait, find a time machine and get the book 3 months ago!

I did receive this book in return for the review.

Comments about O'Reilly Media HTML5: Up and Running:

I recommend this book for web developers! The title covers some of the new features available to developers in the recent release of HTML5, including but not limited to canvas, video, and microdata. I would not recommend this book for beginners in web development, the text reads as if one already has a decent comprehension of earlier versions of HTML and XHTML. For those already familiar with previous languages, this is a great primer into HTML5, briefly explaining use of many new features. The book is authored by Google web engineer and it shows in some of the examples of how to get things working. Being such a new addition to the language, there isn't a whole lot available on the market for study, but the book references many additional resources for getting HTML5 up and running. http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596806033/

Comments about O'Reilly Media HTML5: Up and Running:

Book starts with the history of HTML and then describes the details of the HTML5 specification for some of the more prominent features, and how you can use the new features to improve your website/webapps; New elements are introduced one by one - tags, canvas, video, geo-location, storage, offline web apps, new form features and microdata. He also introduces a nifty JavaScript library, Modernizr, used to check the HTML5 capabilities of the requesting browser (None of the mainstream browsers supports all features of HTML5, though all support some aspects of it). Most of the stuff in the book can be read independently, so, u can skip topics and then can always come back. A web version of this book is available at DiveIntoHTML5.org website maintained by the author and you can browse and explore it at the same time. The linked website is full of interesting illustrations. Both book and website compliments each other. Whether you buy the book or read it online, it's the best introduction to the topic you'll find.

The book is a good start for someone getting into HTML as well for someone who wants to increase his knowledge base. If you are looking for a book to learn about core features of HTML5, this book might be of your interest.

Disclosure: I'm writing this post as part of O'Reilly's blogger review program. While I'm not getting paid to review books, I sure am getting to read them for free.

Comments about O'Reilly Media HTML5: Up and Running:

I read the first few chapters in detail and just perused the others. Why? Because like most developers I am interested in HTML5 (and CSS 3) and hope they get adopted... but since I'm not sure if and when that is going to happen I figured there was little reason to spend on lot of time on the latter component-specific chapters.

I really enjoyed the author's style - he presents technical material clearly while throwing in enough "humanness" to make you want to continue reading (as opposed to dozing off). He not only gives us facts, but also the background info behind many of them, which I find aids understanding - especially in this somewhat controversial topic.

The main reason I gave this 4 stars and not 5 is because I didn't read much of the book thoroughly. But if the latter chapters are as good as the first ones - and I see no reason why they shouldn't be - maybe I'll come back and up the score to 5. (But given the adoption rate of HTML5, that could be awhile ;-)

Comments about O'Reilly Media HTML5: Up and Running:

"HTML5: Up and Running" gives a concise history of web standards that have led to the development of HTML5 which is the next generation web standard. The book then describes all of the details of the HTML5 specification, and how you can use the new features to improve your website. It discusses the following things is particular: detecting HTML5 features, canvas tag, video tag, geolocation, local storage, and new form elements.

Comments about O'Reilly Media HTML5: Up and Running:

Disclaimer: I've received a review copy of this book from O'Reilly.

For the impatient among you a short summary: HTML5: Up and Running is a book presenting you some of the more prominent features of HTML5 including canvas, localStorage and the applicationCache. It sadly leaves out a whole range of other features like WebSockets and the data-attributes. Also the writing style reminds you often enough that this book was created out of the author's Dive Into HTML5 project with each chapter and subchapter being able to stand alone which (thanks to the repetition of explanations et al.) makes reading certain chapters not all that pleasant.

In general, if you want a book that teaches you some of the new core features of HTML5 and you really want a book, this might be something for you.

HTML5: Up and Running by Mark Pilgrim is described on the publisher's website as a "guide [...] through the important changes" that come with HTML5. The focus here lies on features like the new form-elements, canvas, video and audio integration, localStorage and the applicationCache as well as the microdata component of HTML5. All these are presented with a couple of examples so you should know how to use them for basic operations after reading the respective chapters.

HTML5 is put into perspective with the first chapter that tells some of the history of HTML and how changes to the language have been proposed in the past and how HTML5 came to be. Even if you have known most of this before, it is a nicely written summary.

But back to the present. Sadly the described range of features is far from covering all that is important about HTML5. The author forgot about things like the sessionStorage, WebWorkers, WebSockets or the data-attributes. Instead the books contains a couple chapter telling you on how to use ffmpeg and Handbrake to create videos in the codecs and containers supported by most modern web browsers. Space that could have been better used for the new network tools, in my opinion.

Suprisingly the appendix, which contains a short summary on how to detect the new features in a browser (which the author himself summarized with "Try Modernizr"), also contains some of the features not mentioned in the "main chapters". That said, the appendix in itself was in my opinion completely useless since it is bascially just a collection of links to each feature and the detection script. The "missing features" received no explanation what so ever.

Another big issue (at least for me) is the writing style as mentioned above. Explaining the first example line-by-line is a good thing. Repeating that with every following example that only contains a minor variation of the solution might end up annoying the reader (as it did with me).

Don't get me wrong, though: This a good book if you're new to HTML5 and want a book that teaches you some of the new features without going into controversial decisions like microdata vs. rdfa vs. microformats. If you want more or even a complete overview, you will have to look somewhere else, though.