The new generation of tools and technologies that support the display and presentation of Web-based material is complex; a substantial learning curve is required for a developer to become proficient. This book addresses this problem with a selection of case studies that reflect tasks that a developer may wish to undertake. A basic knowledge of the technologies is assumed--specifically Hypertext Markup Language 5 (HTML5), JavaScript, and cascading style sheets 3 (CSS3).

The first chapter (of ten) considers a small graphical exercise, drawing an HTML5 logo; in the second chapter, the focus is on a collage of (graphical) objects and moving them using mouse operations. Video is considered in chapter 3, with a case study consisting of creating a “bouncing ball” video.

The theme of chapter 4 is integrating an external application programming interface (API)--specifically, Google Maps--and in chapter 5 this is developed by further integrating multimedia presentations into the content. The case study for chapter 6 is geolocation using Google’s location service; at this point the reader is introduced to PHP.

Chapter 7 takes a different direction and presents code to instruct the user (with visual illustrations and line drawings) on how to perform simple origami paper folding. A similar graphical task--solving a jigsaw puzzle--is the focus of chapter 8, and this is further developed in chapter 9 by expanding the jigsaw code to form the basis for an educational game. Finally, chapter 10 integrates HTML5, PHP, and MySQL to create a simple database-driven application to store information about Web sites.

A comprehensive index is provided, and source code can be downloaded from the publisher’s Web site.

The general approach taken by this book--that is, the presentation of a set of interesting case studies--is potentially effective, and the code fragments presented in the text are explained clearly. However, I do have some concerns. The text is liberally interspersed with screen shots and with (annotated) copies of the source code (marketed as “a unique table-based format for the code listings”). These together account for more than half of the book (the annotated source code itself takes up almost 200 pages). While the screen shots are occasionally helpful, many of them appear not to fulfill any obvious role, and some of them appear to be almost wholly white space (such as those at the start of chapter 6). Many of the annotations to the source code are unhelpful, and some merely describe the syntax of the code--a programmer who is competent in the language concerned should understand the syntax already, since this understanding is explicit as a prerequisite for the book.

This is not a tutorial on HTML5 (or any other technology). It is simply a collection of sample HTML Web pages coded using JavaScript and CSS (plus some PHP and SQL at the end). While the demonstrated techniques are useful, the explanations following them are simple. The practitioner who already understands the technologies does not need all of the code printed out with annotations for every line; these can be studied from the source code download if required. The book could be improved by removing the source code listings and replacing them with a deeper discussion of the techniques being applied (this is particularly relevant to the chapters containing PHP and SQL).