Teach Yourself Visually HTML5

I wish all computer books and tutorials -- especially Google Tutorials, on Fusion Table and Motion Chart APIs -- were like this! Every subject is essentially a two-page spread side-by-side. By the numbers! Yes, read less, learn more. Copy the example(s). I have this copy to my daughter, but now Amazon is having a serious problem allowing me to buy another copy or two. (And when I order a "free" book on the same subject, HTML 5 for download -- or is it having it in the cloud? -- Amazon can (yet?) handle it, either in legacy paper or Kindle.

This book is for those new to HTML and for dabblers, such as myself. Experienced writers will probably find it useful.First impressions: Most pages have screen prints of code written in a word processor with the results shown on a web browser, which is fine, but unfortunately the text on these screen prints are small to tiny. For example { } looked like parenthesis until I examined them with a magnifying glass.As explained in the book, that while their examples use Windows 'Notepad' to write their code and the Google 'Chrome' browser to display the results, you can use other word processors and browsers. In my case, I used Apple's 'Pages' to create example web pages and then displayed the results with Apple's 'Safari'. Note to Mac users: before you write your first web page in 'Pages' or 'TextEdit', turn off 'smart quotes' in Preferences - Safari will not recognize 'smart quotes'.Weak Organization: Presents unnecessary information too early. For example, a new user doesn't need to know about meta tags so early in the book, even before being introduced to even the simple paragraph tag!Weak HTML Reference: For example, suppose you want to color the background of a paragraph, you flip to the Reference, Style Sheet Properties and find: background-color, defines a background color. There is no format information or page references. Or for example, if you want to look up the format of the statement needed to color a line in canvas, you will find nothing. There are no canvas statements listed, other than the <canvas> tag.Overall, the book does have a lot of useful information but a larger text font in their examples would certainly earn my appreciation.

It's been eons since I programmed anything and I can tell you, there's not much changed. This HTML5 looks like, and feels like, the old IBM scripting language, or any other that I can reference and most of the audience won't even remember. This is a book in an excellente format, seriously prepared as it guides you through all the examples with sunshine clarity. It may be boring for an advanced programmer, but I thoroughly enjoyed it, since it allowed me to review all the details, and SEE them. I do recommend it if you want to learn the basics of HTML5... and the letters are readable!

I really like the format of this book. It provides sample code for each aspect of the main parts of HTML5. Each Chapter presents with an overview on the topic at hand and then steps you through the website development code with a very good explanation. It uses the visual and verbal model of the topic so you can fully understand how the page is generated. This building block model is a great introduction to HTML5. I consider this an introduction text of great value to the new developer. Some of these books have too much explanation and not enough hands on development, this one does not do this. Very nice model for young and new developers.

This book does a good job of quickly and effectively introducing learners to the basics of HTML5 and CSS. The chapter on JavaScript is only good if you're embedding your codes in your HTML document (not recommended). But this isn't a JavaScript book anyway. Just skip that chapter. For that, get a different book that shows you how to set up and link a separate .js document to your HTML document. This book won't give you all that you'll want to learn about HTML and CSS, but by giving the basics to get started, you can connect the dots and see the big picture quicker than with a more comprehensive book, especially if this if your first time.

It's really for beginners - not really great stuff for programmers. For non technical users, it's really great. But for anyone who has a fair amount of programming experience, this book is not the right one- you probably might be knowing 70% of what it has to offer.

Very detailed and easy to follow.

Well laid out and easy to follow. Covers all the basics and cross references throughout. Used it in conjunction with a class, but would work on its own for sure.