Book Notes: Building Touch Interfaces with HTML5 by Stephen Woods
I found this book to be a mostly enjoyable and educational read. The title “Building Touch Interfaces with HTML5” tells you that the book is about touch programming and the subtitle “speed up your site and create amazing user experiences” tells you it is about performance. Given the narrowness of the main title, spending over half the book on performance not directly related to touch seemed a bit odd. If you are familiar with optimizing web performance, much of the first half of the book can be safely skimmed. If not, then you have a good resource to give you some performance tricks.
The last part of the book, the part that focused on touch interactions, was what I was looking forward to and I found the discussion useful and the samples interesting. It contained information on developing for both the webkit touch model as well as the Microsoft pointer events and how to make them work together, which was nice. I also really appreciated the discussion on CSS transitions, animations and transforms and how those could be used in touch programming.
Overall, if you need an introduction to touch event programming on mobile devices, it’s a pretty good book. My only complaint is that for the size I would have wanted more example code around touch and less around performance.
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