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Review of HTML5 For Web Designers by Jeremy Keith

Posted on 07/26/10 in blog, development about development, HTML, HTML5, reviews

HTML5 for Web Designers by Jeremy Keith is a quick and informative 85 page mini-book all about our favorite development topic, HTML5. The book took me a couple of nights to read, but only because I was super short on time, so anyone could easily read the whole book in one or two sittings.

The layouts of the book were nicely designed, the images are clear and crisp and the text is really easy to read. The book is smaller than you’d think, but comes jam packed with a lot great information and little fluff.

The Bad

I normally don’t start off with the bad points, but I feel it’s necessary here as I was extremely disappointed with the way this book was handled.

First off, I preordered my book the day of, or shortly after, preorder become available. Therefor, I expected to be one of the first people to get the books. I wasn’t. In fact, you could’ve ordered your book a week after it was released and gotten it way before me. It took over THREE weeks from the date of release to get my copy.

Also, when the copy came in, it was banged up, the corners were bent badly and the cover was cheap (a drop of water has literally disintegrated the cover). For $18+ I really expected something of higher quality, especially since it’s a paperback. These fudge ups remind me of the sad Smashing Book.

The Chapters

• Chapter 1: A Brief History of Markup - My favorite part of the entire book actually had nothing to do with HTML5, but the first chapter. The first chapter was full of really interesting tidbits on the history of markup and the W3C and why XHTML 2.0 failed. It was really, really interesting (to me at least). The chapters in the book were hilariously named after oldies music. It was a really easy and pleasant reading, although HTML5 specs tend to bore the crap out of me.
• Chapter 2: The Design of HTML 5 – Another great “history” chapter that deals with how HTML5 came to be, what it aims to do and the basics of what the creators were thinking when dreaming up the billion page spec.
• Chapter 3: Rich Media – To be 100% honest, I’m not too crazy about media in HTML5. Never been too crazy about media ever. eh.
• Chapter 4: Web Forms 2.0 – For some reason, this chapter made me super excited about HTML5 web forms. Maybe because it makes complicated forms so much easier thanks to the fact you no longer need jQuery for everything.
• Chapter 5: Semantics – This is a very important issue to me. I’m disappointed that HTML5 takes a lot of the cleanliness out of what XHTML 1.0 forced us to do, but at least semantics are getting better. Not 100% happy with a bunch of this stuff, who uses microformats anyways?
• Chapter 6: Using HTML5 Today -The most useful chapter was the last one, where it talks about how we can use HTML5 today. Definitely interesting. Have been wanting to try my own HTML5 site for awhile now, but just haven’t gotten the time

Must Buy?

Definitely. The book is $18 plus shipping and can be bought at A List Apart.

About the author
Amber Weinberg specializes in clean and semantic XHTML, CSS and WordPress development. She has over 10 years of coding experience and is pretty cool to work with. Amber is available for freelance work, so why not hire her for your next project?

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