The order in which the book is put together makes a lot of sense for the experienced programmer and novice programmer (it’s a long time since I was a novice programmer, yet the order makes sense from a learning perspective). The first chapter gets into the history of HTML (or mark-up languages) which puts things into context regarding mark-up and why HTML5 is so important. After this first chapter it starts with the important discussion regarding detection and the libraries available to quickly (and simply) use detection to best utilize the available HTML5 features. After these first two “introductory” chapters it methodically and with just the right detail dives into the full breadth of the new features within HTML5. I also appreciated the non-programmer related discussion on the why and history of some of the features and related technologies. The chapter on video and codecs is a good example of this.
As I was reviewing the chapter outline of the book to be reminded of highlights, I couldn’t find any. What I mean is all the chapters describing all the features were very interesting to me. And they were all well written and easily understood. I find it hard to find fault with this book; I was looking to read a great intermediate book on HTML5, and I found it with “HTML5: Up and Running”. I’d recommend this book to any developer or designer wanting to get a good technical description (with examples) of the new HTML5 features.
