What you need for this book

The great thing about HTML5 is that there is no cost to use it. You don't need any special tools or licenses to develop web applications. However, using a good code editor will help you a lot, especially as you get started. There's nothing like autosuggest to help you remember JavaScript functions, element names, and styling options. And syntax highlighting is essential for making it easier to read code.

That said, there are a few source code editors that I can suggest if you don't already have one. Notepad++ is a free editor with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS syntax highlighting and some basic autosuggest, without a lot of overhead. I used it to write all of the code in this book. On the higher end, Microsoft Visual Studio provides very good autosuggest features but with more overhead than a basic text editor. Another great option is NetBeans, an open source IDE written in Java with good web development support.

You will also need a web browser with good HTML5 support and developer tools. The latest versions of most browsers support the HTML5 features used in this book. The browser you use should depend on which has the developer tools you like most. I use Chrome because it has great developer tools built-in. Firefox with the Firebug plugin installed is also very good. For this book I use Chrome as the browser of choice. Internet Explorer 9 doesn't completely support all of the HTML5 features we will be learning and the developer tools are not as good as the others, so I would stay away from using it for development.

The one other thing you may need is a web server such as IIS or Apache. Most of the time you can open your web application right from the filesystem when in development. However, some HTML5 features will only work through a web server. I have noted the places in this book where that is the case.