HTML5 In Action

Quick review of a book I was an invited reviewer on.

HTML5 In Action by Rob Crowther, Joe Lennon, Ash Blue and Greg Wanish

www.manning.com/crowther2/

This is a build it up step by step style book rather than a cookbook or a reference guide.  That’s not a bad thing.

If you’re doing HTML5, i.e. using a modern MVC framework, then this is a good book for you.  However you may well find that your framework of choice hides quite a bit from you generating web pages automatically and chances are its used modenizr or bootstrap or similar blended with shiny new HTML5 to give good results so when you look at it you wonder ‘how did they do that?’

And this is where the book really shines.  Chapters 2 and 3 take you on a tour of HTML5 and I’ve found expose most of what Microsoft have chosen to use in the MVC 5 Scaffolding.  As a bonus they are easy to read, digest and test.

We aren’t doing web socket programming at the moment so I can’t comment on the next two chapters but we do plan to start using SignalR shortly which is based on Web Sockets and I do feel I have a decent grounding as a result. I imagine I’ll be referring to this a lot as we implement SignalR.

The graphics section, I’ll be honest, I skimmed.  Its just not something we are involved in but again I felt grounded in it and more importantly know where to go if we ever need it.

Worth buying?

Yes.  Especially if you need to get ‘under the hood’ of your frameworks.

Cheers

Sebastian