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27 Apr 2011 by Brad

Book Review - HTML5 for Web Designers by Jeremy Keith

Recently I went on a splurge of buying industry relevant books and now that I have finally gotten around to reading one of them I thought I'd let you know what I think.

The title of the book made me think that it's not really for me, I'm a developer not a designer, but as a front end developer that line is often blurred and I have a lot of respect for the work Jeremy does so I thought I'd give it a whirl anyway. The book does a very good job of introducing the basic concepts of HTML5, what's new and what you can start using right away. Fortunately the preamble chapter that is inherent in every development language reference book is very short, the history of mark up is not something I am interested in, I want the juicy shiny stuff and I want it now.

The book then gets right into the good stuff, the chapter on forms I found most useful, introducing the newer input elements and how they can be used today without botching up in your clients no doubt older version of Internet Explorer. There is a JS snippet in there that has already made it into my build kit.

I won't go into a lot of detail about the contents of the book, it's not very long and if I did then this post might threaten to become longer in itself. Personally I really liked the book, but it didn't teach me very much that I didn't know already. Really I think that this book is for a fairly niche audience, a person who is confident with HTML but has not yet taken the plunge into looking into HTML5 would find the book to be very helpful. If you are a front end developer who tries to stay up to date, you'll still enjoy the read, but the book is very short and only really touches the surface of HTML5.

I think it'll still live on my desk as a really fast reference guide, it's full of post it notes marking useful tidbits and things that I might need to remember quickly.

Considering that you can buy this book and its counterpart CSS3 for Web Designers in ebook format for 15 dollars, I would say they are a bargain and that you should really read them.

Brad Koehler

I've been a developer now for five years and throughout that time I have moved from being a junior through to a senior with a fantastic agency and now work with two of the best developers I have ever had the good fortune to meet. I enjoy clientside development and accessibility to the point of being a bit of a bore about it!

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