MrQwest

Everyone’s heard of A List Apart right? The sweet website with some fantastic articles on the web published every fortnight? I’m a big fan of ALA, my Instapaper account is full of ALA articles ready to read when I get a spare 10 minutes.

ALA is a great resources for designers & developers alike — in fact, it’s perfect for anyone who works with the web.

So you can tell I’m a fan of A List Apart. Can you imagine my excitement when I heard they were starting a collection of books? Not big books though, short & sweet books all focused on one subject each. No technical mumbo jumbo, just the basics of what you need to know in a no-nonsense manner.

Fantastic! A book doesn’t hold my attention for long so something like this is ideal!

The first book to be released (A Book Apart #1) is written by Jeremy Keith and is called HTML5 For Web Designers.

I read the book on Sunday and so glad I did!

HTML5 isn’t a subject I’ve really looked into; but it is something that I — and every other web developer — should get to know & love. As a specification, HTML5 is still relatively new and the browser makers have only recently (last 6 months or so?) jumped on board – but not all browsers cover the same HTML elements at the moment, so do bear that in mind.

The book however is a great starting point in getting your head around the new HTML5 elements. It gives you quick overviews of the main new tags like <header>, <nav>, <article>, <section> & <canvas> as well as media tags like <audio>, & <video> for native media playback. It also gives you some real world examples on how you’d put these new tags to use including there attributes & how they can make your code more semantic and easier to use.

As I mentioned, this is a whistle stop round-up of HTML5 in a nifty little book. Thanks to Jeremy Keith’s unique writing style, it’s easy-to-read and hard to put down!

I’m certainly looking forward to the next one!

Did you get a copy of this book? What do you reckon?

Why not join the discussion?

1. 

   Andy Carter | Aug 9, 12:03 PM | Permalink

   Looks interesting, might go and order myself a copy.

   HTML5 is certainly looking interesting, but one thing that concerns me is all the excitement over its ability to produce semantic webpages. Considering that the semantic use of the existing (X)HTML markup is so poor (wrong use of tables, emphasis, italic, etc) I don’t really see that people are going to suddenly get any better at it. Unless of course reading about HTML5 makes people finally wake up to the semantic web.