Recommended Book: HTML5 And CSS3: Develop With Tomorrow’s Standards Today

Going by the hype surrounding HTML5, you'd think it's all about animations and taking away the need to use proprietary plugins like Flash and Silverlight. But there's plenty more interesting things in HTML5 (or the related technologies) which you can already start using in your web applications. Brian P. Hogan does an excellent job covering a lot of them in this book.

The first chapter gives you a good overview on what exactly HTML5 and CSS3 will allow you to do, and also contains a helpful list of tags and attributes that will be deprecated in the HTML5 specification. After that, the book is split up in 3 larger parts:

1. Improving User Interfaces
2. New Sights And Sounds
3. Beyond HTML5

The first part consists of 4 chapters that cover how you can improve the things that you're already doing with HTML. You'll learn about new structural tags and attributes that help you avoid 'divitis', how you can create much better forms, and a bunch of new CSS selectors that'll make your CSS code much cleaner and easier. Finally, you'll learn more about how to make sure that your pages are accessible to people who require assistive technology to browse your site/webapp. What's really interesting about these chapters is that for each new thing that is discussed, fallback strategies for browsers that don't support the new features are covered as well.

The second part covers the features that most of the hype surrounding HTML5 is based on: drawing on the canvas, embedding audio and video in your pages and some very interesting eye candy features from CSS3 such as rouding corners, drop shadows, element rotation, gradients and the improved font features.

The final part covers some technologies that are often associated with HTML5 but aren't actually part of the specification. Things like client-side storage options, managing browser-history, cross-document messaging, web sockets and geolocation. Each of these are covered with clear examples. The final chapter covers some topics that are likely to change in the near future but it gives you a good idea on what to expect from CSS transitions, web workers, WebGL, IndexedDB, Drag & Drop and client-side validation.

Overall, the quality of writing is excellent, the examples are very clear and despite being a quick read at 231 pages (not counting the appendices) it covers quite a lot of interesting things, most of which you can indeed start using today. This book won't make you an expert on any of the topics it covers though, nor is that its intention. It is a great way to get started with these new features and technologies though, and encourages you to dig deeper.