Upshot: Like most Head First books, this is a good ‘general’ start to the topic at hand. Downsides? If you have more than one HF book.. you may begin to see a pattern here.

Head First HTML5 Programming by Eric Freeman, Elisabeth Robson is another dense, soup to nuts tome that weighs in at 610 pages. The authors attempt, and IMHO succeed in covering the current territory-in-flux that is HTML5.

If you are already versed in HTML4, this book will bring you up to speed with what is offered by HTML5: web workers, local storage, Canvas, as well as JSON(P) and how these features combine to so that you can make client/server web apps.

I was especially impressed by the ‘real world’ examples —like using Canvas to ‘iron on’ image elements & Twitter texts on tshirts, as well as using the tag & Canvas to make a movie/video ‘tv’ UI with ‘live filter effects’. There’s even a fractal explorer you can make with Web Workers. Nice!

After reviewing a couple of Head First books, I think the only think that doesn’t work for me personally are the “interviews.” But your mileage may vary….

HIghly recommended in any case if you need to get into general HTML5. Note that if you need more emphasis on ‘Mobile’ or ‘JQuery’ see the other books I’ve reviewed here.

LINK: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920010906.do

EXAMPLE FILES: http://examples.oreilly.com/0636920010906/

Disclosure: I received the eBook download(s) from O’Reilly for review purposes.