HTML5 for Web Designers is a short and pleasant introduction to HTML5.

The book, 87 pages long, is published by the folks of A List Apart, a blog about website design that I follow. It's a quick read -- the book probably took me no more than 30 minutes -- and it gives you the highlights of HTML5 quickly. The introduction, with the history of the development of HTML standards, was interesting.

HTML5

Web Forms 2.0 is very useful. I think the micro-format like elements such as mark and time are good additions, but I'm not so sure about the new structure elements. The article vs section is a little confusing, and I'm not sure what their added value is. I'm not so convinced of the benefits of the more flexible nesting and outlining that the author describes.

Obviously, the standardization of video and audio playback is huge (as long as we can all agree on the encoding...).

For my work, the Web Forms 2.0 elements are probably going to be the most useful: marking fields as required, specifying that input fields can take numeric input only, etc. Today we use JavaScript libraries for this. A library like ExtJS already allows you to specify this declaratively but native browser support would be even better.

The book purposely did not go into the new standardized JavaScript APIs that are part of HTML5, that would be a nice topic to read on.