| The Essential Guide to HTML5 |
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Author: Jeanine Meyer This is a very odd book. It claims to be about HTML5 but the subtitle is more honest - "Using Games to learn HTML5 and JavaScript". Apart from the use of a few tags such as canvas, video and sound this is basically a - let's write some simple games using JavaScript book. Quite a few of the programs could be written using nothing but HTML 4 and perhaps some JavaScript library or other. 
Chapter 1 sets off to tell you about the basics and it is indeed very basic. Chapter 2 is where the book really starts and it uses a dice game to show you how JavaScript works - random number generator, if, and functions. If you don't already program in some language or other this is all going to be over your head. This is also where you meet the very strange presentation of programs using a table format. The idea is that column one holds a programming instruction and column two holds comments on it. In the first chapter where everything is commented it seems as though it might be a good idea, but even here we find comments that basically repeat the code. So for example the comment for ctx.closePath() is "Close path" - this clearly doesn't help and it just increases the density of useless things you have to read. From dice, which could have been implemented using HTML4, we move on to a bouncing ball which uses the Canvas in a more creative way with the addition of a gradient - but once again the "game" could have been implemented using HTML4. The table layout of the program carries on but now the comments are getting thinner. There is also a tendency not to describe functions in the main text that the are arguably important. The bouncing ball animation is extended in the next chapter to include simulated gravity - a cannonball and slingshot game. This is used to introduce transformations. Chapter 5 implements a memory game and uses the timer for a pause. Chatper 6 implements a quiz, 7 implements a maze, 8 is rock, paper, sissors, 9 is Hangman and 10 is Blackjack. If you have implemented any games of this very basic type using almost any language - QBasic, Visual Basic, Java or even JavaScript using HTML 4 - then this book isn't going to teach you very much. Even though it claims to teach you HTML5 and JavaScript it isn't very effective at this. It reads more like a re-hash of a "let's write some simple games" book to jump on the HTML5 bandwagon. This said, if you are ignorant of such elementary game technques then you might get something out of the book. However it would be a better book if it dropped the tabular presentation of the program code and made more of an effort to discuss the code in the main text.
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| Last Updated ( Monday, 10 January 2011 ) |