Windows 8 Application Development with HTML5 For Dummies 1st Edition

Great worked out well for me

I bought this book after reading some excerpts and expected this to be a good introduction to programming Win 8 apps using HTML5. Unfortunately, the text and code samples are often missing key information. The templates created by Visual Studio do not match the code samples and there is no help in the text on migrating to the Visual Studio current format. The provided sample code information is frequently inconsistent. It's exhausting to try to learn something while also struggling to correct the frustratingly incorrect text/samples. As written in the text, these samples do not run. Clearly there was no one doing QA on the book. For example, the code sample on page 92 has a line "itemsDiv.innerHTML blah blah" but the next paragraph says to add a "<div id="Items"></div>". These are supposed to be referring to the same div tag and it's up to the reader to reconcile the inconsistent information to get the sample to run. There are too many other instances of this that are far less obvious or that are missing critical information. What should be a simple process of entering code and viewing the result takes hours to adjust so that it produces the feature being described. I don't know what book the other reviewer used for the glowing review but it cannot have been this book.

This book really took my skills from their basic level to new heights in a very short time. The author clearly spent a lot of time crafting thorough examples that address the fundamentals, as well as introducing the new concepts of windows 8 development.