Jeremy Keith‘s style is highly readable and the brevity of the book meant he could focus on getting every paragraph just right, where heftier books can feel rushed, waffly or irrelevant at times.

As you’d expect from a book that names Jeffrey Zeldman as its publisher, it’s well presented and the A5 size makes it really pleasant to hold – something I think is overlooked by many publishers. Some of the images are not the last word in quality, but they aren’t awfully important anyway. However, what might be disappointing to many readers is that this book is about markup and markup only. Those expecting to learn more about the new Javascript APIs, font handling, location data, CSS3, browser storage and all the other hugely exciting next generation browser features are going to be very disappointed. It’s also not an in depth technical reference, but then that’s not the point. The whole point is to give web professionals something that will provide the essential information they need in an easily digestible format that will waste as little of their time as possible. It’s the whole ethos behind the new A Book Apart brand and one I wholeheartedly support.

If you wanted to be critical of the book, you could argue the information can all be found on blog posts around the web for free, so why pay for it? The trouble with blog posts is they’ll give you little snippets that vary in style, quality and reliability – you won’t be getting the whole picture or a consistent one. As far as I’m concerned, this book filled in the gaps beautifully and I’ve certainly come away with a clearer understanding of what HTML5 is all about.