I have in my hand a copy of HTML5 for Web Designers by Jeremy Keith.

It’s concise and fantastic. And I think it represents the direction things are going on the web.
I’ve been doing web development as a full-time job for 7 years now. I remember once I dove in, and first bought Designing with Web Standards [the orange one] and Eric Meyer on CSS.

Since then, I’ve done a ton of work with PHP, some Rails work, a year of JSP/ Struts and a lot of Javascript.
I’ve worked executing the visions of many visual designers. And have designed and created many user interfaces along the way.

About a year and a half ago, I started investing heavily in working with Adobe Flex. At the time, I believed it promised a lot of great simplification in building Rich Internet Applications. At the time, the promise of having the AIR runtime to deploy to a desktop app and a great tool for building rich interfaces won me over. I went to one spectacular conference, met a ton of great people, and built some cool projects. The biggest draw at the time was the ability to make desktop apps in AIR work nearly the same as applications viewed in the browser in the Flash plugin. Sure, maybe one day it would work in Mobile devices too.

Anyway, I’ve had a bunch of transition in my life and have been re-evaluating and re-focusing.

I think that with runtimes like Adobe AIR and Appcelerator’s Titanium Desktop and Mobile, investing heavily in HTML5, CSS3 and all of the badass things one can do with Canvas. Anyway, I’m done wasting my time with Flex, and I’m more excited about the future of web standards and browsers than I ever have been.

It’s a good thing A Book Apart isn’t selling this book in stores, because it’s readable in about 30 minutes, and not anything you’ll ever refer back to. I’m glad I bought my copy, and I’m happy to pass it along to anybody who wants to buy me a sandwich. I recommend it, but more for what it represents than what it actually contains.

I’m looking forward to a few new publications coming out in the next several months, and think that the new service from Think Vitamin is a much better resource to start learning.

I hope to continue to become even more expert in the DOM and browser-based web technologies.

Related posts:

1. At the Crossroads…Crossroads
2. Making Flex Development a Lot Easier with Blueprint
3. Joshua : Web Standards at Yahoo! (with transcript) : MIX Online
4. Simon Rich, author of "Ant Farm & Other Desperate Situations"
5. End of my first week of work

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