The Apress book Pro HTML5 Programming was written by three authors: Peter Lubbers, Brian Albers and Frank Salim. In this book the authors introduce the reader to the most popular and useful features of HTML5.

The book contains 11 concise chapters: An overview of HTML5, the Canvas API, audio and video, the Geolocation API, the Communication API, the WebSocket API, Forms, the Web Workers API, the Web Storage API, Offline Web Applications and the future of HTML5.

This book succeeds in breaking the myth that HTML5 will not be applicable until 2022. The authors demonstrate this by accompanying all theory with a ton of examples based on realistic scenarios. The examples are not to complex, and most of the time, cut in well sized pieces, which makes them easy to digest. The authors show you how to detect whether a certain feature is supported by the hosting browser. They do not provide information on fallback mechanismes though, which I think is a good thing, because it would only break the tight scoping of the book.

Developers who are new to HTML and JavaScript should pick up other books first, some experience with client-side webdevelopement is adviced.

I think this book is a good read and can serve as an excellent introduction to HTML5. You should get it before it’s obsolete ;).

My rating: 4/5.