Introduction

Why This Book?

The concept for this book grew out of Robin’s extremely popular online courses in which thousands of students are enrolled. From their feedback, it became evident that the reason for this popularity was that students love the way the material is broken up into easy-to-digest lessons, each of which can be completed in an hour or less. They also like the no-nonsense, jargon-free, and friendly writing style.

Now, working together, Robin and McGraw-Hill Education have further revised, updated, and developed his HTML5 course into this book, which not only will teach you everything you need to learn in 20 lessons (of less than an hour each), but it also includes an average 15-minute detailed video walkthrough for each lesson—almost five hours of footage in total. Watch the videos after reading the lesson to reinforce key concepts, or use the video as a primer to working through each print lesson. Together, the book and videos make learning HTML5 easier than it has ever been, and they are the ideal way for you to add HTML5 skills to your web development toolkit.

         Access the videos by going to mhprofessional.com/nixonhtml5/.

Who Should Read This Book

Each chapter is laid out as a lesson in a straightforward and logical manner, with plenty of examples written using simple and clear HTML. Before moving on to each subsequent lesson, you have the opportunity to test your new knowledge with a set of 10 questions about what you have just learned. You can also work along with every lesson by watching its accompanying video tutorial.

Even if you don’t already know the previous version of HTML (version 4.1), you will still learn quickly, because the first part of the book contains a comprehensive primer—great for beginners, or useful for revising before moving on to the new features.

To save you typing them in, all the example files from the book are saved in a freely downloadable zip file available at the companion website: 20lessons.com.

What This Book Covers

This book covers every aspect of HTML and HTML5, starting with how to lay out an HTML document; handling fonts, colors, and images; creating lists and tables; and building forms. Then, after teaching some elementary JavaScript, it explains how to use the HTML5 canvas as a drawing tool, shows how you can access a user’s geolocation information, presents the latest updates to web forms, reveals how to make use of local storage on the user’s device and, after illustrating how easy it now is to add audio and video to your pages, also details how to make offline web apps, and run background JavaScript tasks.

How to Use This Book

This book has been written in a logical order so that each lesson builds on information learned in the previous ones. If you have never used HTML before, you should begin at Lesson 1 and then work sequentially through the book, proceeding to the next lesson only when you can correctly answer the self-test questions in the previous one.

If you already use HTML4.1, you can jump right into the HTML5 section, but I recommend you at least browse through the earlier lessons to refresh your memory of all the available features, many of which have been updated in HTML5.

How Is This Book Organized?

Although this book has three parts, they consist of just two approaches. The first deals with teaching all the HTML4 elements and how they go together to make up an HTML document, while the second explains the enhancements that have been added to HTML5.

In Part I, “Basic HTML,” the lessons include: An Introduction to HTML4; the Layout of an HTML Document; the HTML Document Body; Fonts, Colors, and Images; Creating Lists and Tables; Links, Forms, and Frames; and Using the Remaining HTML4 Tags.

Part II, “HTML5 and the Canvas,” includes these lessons: What’s New in HTML5; Accessing the Canvas; Creating Rectangles, Fills, Gradients, and Patterns; Writing Text to the Canvas; Drawing Lines, Paths, and Curves; Manipulating Images, Shadows, and Pixels; Compositing, Transparency, and Transformations.

Part III, “Advanced HTML5,” includes these lessons: Supporting Geolocation; Building Advanced Forms; Implementing Local Storage and Cross-document Messaging; Playing Audio; Displaying Video; and Working with Microdata, Web Workers, and Web Applications.

The Appendix lists all the answers to the self-test questions in each chapter.