With web development it’s always absolutely vital to keep up with the latest hot topic, be that the latest JavaScript trick, CSS techniques, optimisations for serving data faster, or new technologies.

Unfortunately, it’s nowhere near as easy as it sounds! Web technology moves at such a breakneck pace that it is near impossible to keep on top of the latest trends and cool code.

This is very much the case with HTML 5. Now that major browser support has arrived, the collection of technologies that come under the general heading “HTML 5″ have been propelled into the limelight, both for developers looking to build web apps with awesome functionality and users expecting great experiences online.

This is where Pro HTML 5 Programming comes in.

This book covers pretty much every topic any web developer could possibly want regarding building the latest client-side interfaces. A sample of its content includes:

• HTML 5 Overview
• Canvas
• Audio and video
• Geolocation
• Communication
• WebSockets
• Forms
• Web Workers
• Web Storage

All of these take a truly cutting-edge approach, describing in detail how the new technology works, and covering all of the improvements to pre-existing technologies.

With each section, there are real-world examples and code showing you how the principles and APIs can be put into practice, clearly walking you through each of the design decisions you would need to make upon implementation, and providing information on the options and cross-browser support of the features. Somehow this book has managed to take an excellent snapshot of HTML 5 technologies that, despite the fast-paced advancement and changing landscape every day, provides a solid introduction and reference to experienced developers looking to move to the HTML 5 world.

I have had this book on hand for some days now and already find myself reaching for it on many occasions to make use of its guidance when implementing a feature of HTML 5 I have not worked closely with previously.

You can get your hands on the book from Amazon today.

Wow, HTML 5 had a brilliant time at Google IO last week. Here’s a recap of some of the top news coming from the event regarding the technology.

At their developer event Google IO, Google took the opportunity to announce WebM, a new project for pushing a video codec for HTML 5 that everyone can agree on.

I’ve been a long-time supporter of HTML 5, and have been getting excited about its prospects for some time. However, the announcement of this codec makes me even more excited than before.

Finally, we have a codec that all of the major browser vendors will be supporting for HTML 5. Finally, developers need not dream of a utopia where they only need encode their video once, and have it work on all major browsers – with HTML 5 and WebM together, we can now have that dream as new builds of the browsers are released.

I absolutely adore writing JavaScript. Like many things with many people, I’m not very good at it and probably shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near it, but I just can’t get enough of doing it.

I was fortunate enough to spend about half of the past few days at work (while not testing a massive number of bug fixes) writing a big pile of JavaScript. You may have seen me present the TweetMeme Chrome Extension a few weeks ago now at the Chrome developer event in London.

I’ve been taking the opportunity to brush up on my JavaScript knowledge and techniques. One thing I have discovered is that building robust, reliable, bug-free JavaScript is a lot more difficult than in a lot of other languages.

Thanks to everyone who came to my Reading Geek Night presentation about IE 9 and HTML 5 last night!

It was a pleasure talking to you all, and hopefully you got something out of the evening.

All my slides on the night were powered by HTML 5, so I have zipped them up (minus the space shuttle launch video – it was HD so quite a big file) and they are now available to download below.

Hopefully catch up with you all at an event soon!

Download Slides