Customer Reviews

HTML5: Designing Rich Internet Applications (Visualizing the Web)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Plain and simple, this book provides the basics to get started with HTML5 and CSS3 in a proper format. Coming from a 10yr. veteran of HTML4 and XHTML, I found the book to be well suited for beginners and us experts alike. You need books like this to help leverage the very fundamentals that are often overshot by the rest of your community. How many times have you gone back to see proper usage for your tags or attributes? I like good clean books like this to keep me grounded. Personally I own a good collection of books by Matthew David as his writing style is point blank.

to Brooklynite: Maybe you should get more in touch with your fellow developers and designers. Lorem Ipsum is standard practice for templating and concepting. If you didn't grasp that this book isn't a "tutorialfest" for copy and paste code, maybe you should look elsewhere instead of leaving a one star review. There are a few misprints and some code mishaps, but nothing that you couldn't intelligently work around.

Overall, I would highly recommend this book to anyone looking for a great introduction and place to start with HTML5 and CSS3. Also the updated site for reference and code is [...]

I found this book quite informative and useful. My own HTML knowledge stopped growing around 1995, so it was invigorating finding out what was up with cascading style sheets, the more streamlined aspects of HTML5, Canvas elements and tieing things together with JavaScript. And the author is very up energy about his subject, sometimes getting too rah rah about what can be done with HTML5. However, I would be hard pressed to recommend the book as it is confusedly formatted, and has quite a bit of extraneous material.

The formatting is worst when laying out several pages of JavaScript at the end. The point of code listings in books are to illustrate techniques, so code listings should be well tabbed out with little functionality per line, so the reader can learn from reading the code. My eyes were glazing over trying to read it. And the rest of the layouts are also badly done. Laying out technical books can be done well. Pick up any O'Reilly book and see what I mean.

I have one quibble that has stuck in my mind. The author asserts that programmers with previous experience with Java, C#, or ActionScript should pick up JavaScript easily. I can't speak for ActionScript, but that is the kind of attitude that ends up with JavaScript having such a poor reputation amongst programmers. JavaScript has a prototyping object model which is completely and frustratingly different then the inheritance model used by most other languages. Raising someones expectations of a smooth transition is a recipe for cognitive rebellion. In general, the JavaScript portions of the text are the weakest.

The portions involving style sheets and describing new features and ideas of HTML5 are the strongest, and very informative and useful. I'm looking forward to improving my own pages with the techniques shown. I'm particularly impressed by how one can manipulate simple unordered list elements into whatever output form the designer chooses. That's a powerful idea.

Another quibble, it wasn't appropriate filling several pages with how to generate Ogg and other video files. This book isn't about that and the editor should have cut it.

In summary, an interesting topic, and a book with some really good parts, ruined by lousy layout, and a lack of focus.

See PS first

The book would have gotten a higher review if I could find the code on-line. On page 100 it says to go to [...] to download the code. I can not find it there, indeed the page says it is "this is a future home page" and links to advertisements.
This is not a reference book but a good overview of some of the features of HTML5 for the intermediate programmer - someone who has used HTML,CSS and Javascript but may not be familiar with code libraries such as YUI.

PS Got new link to code The correct website is given by the author in the comment attached to this posting (the last time I posted a URL it was deleted)

There is quite a bit of good info here on HTML5. I particularly enjoy the examples the author gives of popular sites that currently use some of the technology he discusses (Google Docs comes up a lot, for example). However, I cannot in good faith recommend this book. There are many typos, as has been pointed out by several other reviewers. I will forgive many typos in the main text, but I cannot forgive typos in the code. Many of the examples given will, quite simply, not work unless you make a few changes. This is fine if you already know some HTML, but then why would you have this book?

I was just trying to work through a code example on pp. 230 ff. called "Crowd Control." This is NOT in the example files that the author has posted in some of the comments here. (By the way, the only reason I even knew the code was available online is that I read it here on Amazon. It is mentioned exactly ONCE in the book, and the URL there is wrong.) There is an image used in the example that is also not in the example files, without which I assume the code won't do much. I say I assume that the code won't do much because there are too many other errors to try it! There are some missing semicolons and some indentation inconsistencies that make things a bit hard to decipher.

Perhaps this book will be better in a second edition, but for now, I can't recommend it.

Look, I don't mind typos on sentences (Hey, if you wanna read a book written in proper English, read Shakespeare!) - but typos on sample codes are just UNACCEPTABLE! For instance, the author writes that one of the new elements in HTML5 is the <NAV> tag to markup the navigation section, yet one of the sample codes uses <NAVIGATION> tag (no mention of <NAVIGATION> tag was given prior to that sample code), so which is it, <NAV> or <NAVIGATION>? There are so many inconsistencies in this book, you'll need a patience to read through it. Also, you'll definitely need prior HTML experience! This book is for intermediate/advanced developers. If you are new to HTML, get a book on HTML4 or XHTML and learn the basics before you learn HTML5.

That said, this book can be useful for understanding the general (theoretical) idea of HTML5, but don't use it as a reference book to write your own HTML5 code because the sample codes in this book are untrustworthy. Here's the run-down of who should and shouldn't buy this book:

Buy this book if you:
- are familiar with previous versions of HTML (i.e. HTML4, XHTML, etc...).
- are curious about "what's in the store" for HTML5.

Don't buy this book if you:
- are new to HTML. Buy a book on HTML4 and/or XHTML instead and learn the basics using the more-stable HTML.
- are looking for a HTML5 reference book - like I said, the sample codes in this book are just not trustworthy.

If you read this book you will learn html5.
But the many snafus make it very distracting.

You can't try the examples because the css is not supplied.
Or if it is I haven't encountered the download link.

Then the numerous typos - depreciated apis (should be deprecated)
Or defining CGI as computer graphics interface instead of Common Gateway Interface

Or how about the sidebar that begins "the project in this chapter is no exception". Exception to what? It doesn't correlate to anything on the page or even to another side bar. The proofreading was obviously done by the author's english teacher, or someone not very technical. And they did a very rush job!

Also in many cases (but not all!) the code is described before the output is displayed so you think it is describing the previous display- the book is poorly organized and so even though you will learn html5 you probably want to find something better. If you want to say one thing good - the colors are nice!

I design some personal websites as a hobby and have been fairly proficient at earlier versions of HTML and CSS. As the Web moves forward, I must too, and this book is a wonderful way to get acquainted with HTML5, CSS3, and refresh my JavaScript knowledge.

The book is organized into five sections that cover the following: HTML5 Tag Structure, Building a Web Site Using HTML5 Blocking Elements; Picture CSS3, Applying CSS3 to Your Web Design; Rendering HTML5 Illustration, Inserting Video into Your Web Design; HTML5 Rich Media Foundation, Creating SVG Logos and CANVAS Charts; HTML5 JavaScript Model, Working with JavaScript.

I found the book to be well organized and very comprehensive. It explains the new language and its attributes as well as listing elements and attributes that are no longer supported or deprecated. The text is well written and the examples are easy to follow and understand. Additionally, the index at the back of the book is very good to help find something specific. It is excellent for both those new to designing websites and for those who are experienced and need a refresher or a resource.

Not only full of mistakes and inaccuracies, this book also recommends anti-patterns and bad practices that lead to non-standards-conformant applications that will not work consistently cross-browser, will not validate, are not accessible... the list goes on. The author's history and chronology is inaccurate, and work is attributed to the wrong people. Worse, the technical errors in the book range from usage of incorrect (non-existant) HTML elements to markup anti-patterns to brittle mis-use of CSS. There are a number of alternative books with much higher quality both from a technical and an editorial perspective. This book is not recommended for anyone.

Though this is more of an introduction to HTML5 than an in depth 'course', if you don't have experience with HTML, XHTML and CSS then this book may be a bit more difficult to follow and understand. So it is probably not for beginners. One of the things I found this book helps you with is how to use HTML5 to create images and to embed video and audio into web pages. It covers a variety of things that can be included in your HTML5 usage such as working with JavaScript and JQuery as well as using additional Ajax libraries. Also this is not really a reference book and due to this I think is not all that handy to have around, especially since HTML5 is still an evolving technology.

It's tough to rate a tech book like this - the content in clearly written, well presented, and the author has a sense of humor. The editor was asleep, and I doubt the book was peer-reviewed (I used to peer-review college tech manuals years ago.) Lots of grammar errors ("are" instead of "is" and the like) and typos. The information itself is accurate, the feel of the book is professional (figuratively and literally - the cover feels like felt) and it's your typical high-quality paper used in these manuals.

As another reviewer mentioned, these books do have a short shelf life - things change fast, especially when it comes to a new standard. Who supports what and when, etc. I'm an experienced web developer, and found this book to be a good introduction. "Oh, that's cool..." and "I'll have to remember that" entries abound. Newbies will get a good feel for what's in store, pros with what's on the horizon. First I had to change from BR to BR /, now it's back to BR.

You'll also notice that the browser screen grabs are Google Chrome, not the ubiquitous IE.

The author's web site mentioned on page 100 (visualizingtheweb) is not there - so you can't download the examples.

The content gets a five. The editing gets a two.