Chapter 1, Why HTML5?, begins by answering why learning how to develop in HTML5 can be an incredibly important skillset to acquire. We will continue with a complete overview of all of the different technologies that make up HTML5 and how they are utilized.

Chapter 2, Preparing for the Battle, covers the important process of preparing assets such images, audio, and video for the web. This chapter also covers many of the important aspects of JavaScript development and how they differ from ActionScript 3.

Chapter 3, Scalability, Limitations, and Effects, aims to inform you about many of the limitations that HTML5 developers regularly encounter while developing for the web today. We will also take our first detailed look into the newest addition of Cascading Style Sheets, CSS3. Finally we will overview some of the most interesting new additions to HTML development by looking at HTML5 Web Workers, Web Sockets, the Canvas element, and finally WebGL.

Chapter 4, Building Robust Applications with HTML5, continues to look deeper into JavaScript development by aiming to structure code in an object-oriented manner. Comparisons to ActionScript 3 class structure, usage, and syntax are made as well as an overview of some libraries and frameworks to aid in building robust HTML5 applications.

Chapter 5, Code Once, Release Everywhere, looks at applications and code libraries that enabled developers to easily target multiple platforms with a single application build, minimizing development time and maximizing public usage. We will spend a good portion of our time diving into the CreateJS framework and all of its packages. Finally we will cover how CSS3 media queries can allow for targeted element styling on a wide variety of screens.

Chapter 6, HTML5 Frameworks and Libraries, continues to dig into the wide variety of amazing framework and libraries available to you when developing your next HTML5 application. We begin by checking out one of the most popular libraries online today, that is jQuery. Along with the jQuery JavaScript library, we will look at how the jQuery Mobile project can transform a simple HTML document into a mobile-friendly user interface. Finally we will check out other open source projects such as Google V8, Node.js, and Three.js.

Chapter 7, Choosing How You Develop, looks at many of the popular code editing platforms that are available to HTML5 developers. We will overview many of the absolute necessities most developers require from coding environments when developing for the web. We will also take some time to check out the Adobe Edge Animate platform which brings a Flash-like user interface for creating HTML5 animations.

Chapter 8, Exporting to HTML5, continues to look at more software that allows you to write your HTML5 applications in platforms like Adobe Flash and compile them directly into HTML5. We will overview many popular platforms that export to HTML5 such as Jangaroo, Haxe, and Google's Dart.

Chapter 9, Avoiding the Roadblocks, attempts to display and discuss many of the typical issues developers face when working with many of the new additions to HTML5. In this chapter, we will develop a simple 2D side scrolling game and examine where common issues occur.

Chapter 10, Preparing for Release, concludes this book by discussing many of the common tasks usually performed on HTML5 applications prior to publishing them on the Internet. We will discuss proper browser testing methods and the utilization of "nightly" web browser releases. We will discuss many ways to benchmark your HTML5 content with external applications and browser plugins to enable you to inspect for runtime issues. Finally we will discuss methods to automate processes that web developers find themselves doing repeatedly by using applications like Grunt.

For a complete understanding of the book, the following software are required:

Access to the Internet to download up to date versions of open source libraries and frameworks.

This book has been specifically targeted at developers with experience with developing web application and games in Adobe Flash who are ready to add HTML5 development to their skillset.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."

A block of code is set as follows:

  this.setX = function(x) { _xVal = x; }
  this.setY = function(y) { _yVal = y; }
  this.currentX = function() { return _xVal; }
  this.currentY = function() { return _yVal; }
  this.currentWidth = function() { return _widthVal; }
  this.currentHeight = function() { return _heightVal; }

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

  this.setX = function(x) { _xVal = x; }
  this.setY = function(y) { _yVal = y; }
  this.currentX = function() { return _xVal; }
  this.currentY = function() { return _yVal; }
  this.currentWidth = function() { return _widthVal; }
  this.currentHeight = function() { return _heightVal; }

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".

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