What You Need to Know to Before You Build HTML5 Apps

Building mobile apps with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript may be easier than picking up new languages like Java and Cocoa, but you’re still going to need to know how to do some programming. So what skills do you need to make good apps? O’Reilly Radar writer Howard Wen talked to Programming HTML5 Applications Zachary Kessin about what you need to know.

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According to Kessin, some of the core skills for building HTML5 applications are:

• Functional programming
• Understanding of asynchronous operations

He notes that although you can get by without knowing a lot about JavaScript, he recommends really getting to know the language and using JSHint to clean-up your code. There’s also JSLint, a more liberal alternative to JSHint (see our coverage). Kessin also suggests using JQuery instead of directly accessing the DOM.

If you want to get started right away, we covered resources for learning HTML5 here, for learning JavaScript here and for learning JQuery here.

Of these resources, pay particular attention to Eloquent JavaScript, which covers functional programming.

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