What this book covers

Chapter 1, Getting Started with Paths and Text, begins by covering the basics of sub-path drawing and then moves on to more advanced path drawing techniques by exploring algorithms to draw zigzags and spirals. Next, the chapter dives into text drawing and then completes with an exploration of fractals.

Chapter 2, Shape Drawing and Composites, begins by covering the basics of shape drawing and also shows you how to use color fills, gradient fills, and patterns. Next, the chapter takes an in-depth look at transparencies and composite operations, and then provides recipes for drawing more complex shapes such as clouds, gears, flowers, card suits, and even a full vector-style jet complete with layers and shading.

Chapter 3, Working with Images and Videos, covers the basics of image and video handling, shows you how to copy-and-paste sections of the canvas, and covers different types of pixel manipulation. The chapter also shows you how to convert images into data URLs, save a canvas drawing as an image, and load a canvas with a data URL. Finally, the chapter ends with a pixilated image focus algorithm that can be used to focus and blur images dynamically with pixel manipulation.

Chapter 4, Mastering Transformations, explores what’s possible with canvas transformations, including translations, scaling, rotations, mirror transforms, and free-form transformations. In addition, the chapter also explores the canvas state stack in detail.

Chapter 5, Bringing the Canvas to Life with Animation, begins by constructing an Animation class to handle an animation stage, and shows you how to create a linear motion, a quadratic motion, and an oscillating motion. Next, it covers some more complex animations such as the oscillation of a soap bubble, a swinging pendulum, and rotating mechanical gears. Finally, the chapter ends with a recipe for creating your own particle physics simulator, and also provides a recipe for creating hundreds of microscopic organisms inside the canvas to stress performance.

Chapter 6, Interacting with the Canvas: Attaching Event Listeners to Shapes and Regions, begins by constructing an Events class which extends the canvas API by providing a means for attaching event listeners to shapes and regions on the canvas. Next, the chapter covers techniques for getting the canvas mouse coordinates, detecting region events, detecting image events, detecting mobile touch events, and drag-and-drop. The chapter ends by providing a recipe for creating an image magnifier and another recipe for creating a drawing application.

Chapter 7, Creating Graphs and Charts, provides production-ready graph and chart classes, including a pie chart, a bar chart, an equation grapher, and a line chart.

Chapter 8, Saving the World with Game Development, gets you started with canvas game development by showing you how to create an entire side-scroller game called Canvas Hero. The chapter shows you how to create sprite sheets, create levels and boundary maps, create classes to handle the hero, the bad guys, the level, and the hero’s health, and also shows you how to structure the game engine using an MVC (model view controller) design pattern.

Chapter 9, Introducing WebGL, begins by constructing a WebGL wrapper class to simplify the WebGL API. The chapter introduces WebGL by showing you how to create a 3D plane and a rotating cube, and also shows you how to add textures and lighting to your models. The chapter ends by showing you how to create an entire 3D world that you can explore in first person.

Appendices A, B, and C discuss other special topics such as canvas support detection, security, canvas vs. CSS3 transitions and animations, and the performance of canvas applications on mobile devices.