Discover HTML5 Canvas essentials, draw shapes, delve into transformations and animations, and explore interactive applications with advanced mouse and keyboard handling. Gain insights into creating dynamic web graphics.

Kirupa is an MIT grad who works at Microsoft as Senior Program Manager. He has been tinkering with web technologies since 1998. He works on the Edge browser team where he gets to sink his teeth into the cutting-edge web technologies.

HTML5 is taking over the browsers and one of the coolest things in HTML5 is the canvas - the immediate mode drawing surface you have in HTML for bringing pixels to life using JavaScript. It is used to create games, graphs, and animations.

This is an extensive course with interactive playgrounds (so you don't have to install anything). The course can be divided into four parts.

1. Understand basics of Canvas and compare it with DOM.
2. Learn how to draw shapes.
3. Take a deep dive into canvas transformations and animations.
4. Explore advanced mouse and keyboard handling to create truly interactive applications using canvas.

If none of what I just wrote makes sense, then the content here is just what you need 😀 . Let's get started.

HTML5 Canvas: From Noob to Ninja - an interactive deep dive

When drawing shapes on the `canvas`, you can actually go really REALLY far without ever having to draw a rectangle. The reason for that is simple. Rectangles are terrible things that nobody should ever have to deal with:

Putting my irrational hatred for our rectangular brethren aside, a rectangle is a shape that you must learn to properly represent on a `canvas`. Even if you can never envision yourself using rectangles, remember - **squares** are rectangles as well. They are rectangles whose sides are all the same size. In this short tutorial, we'll walk through the basics of how to draw rectangles inside a `canvas` element.

Onwards!

>### Brief Intro to Canvas
>The `canvas` element allows you to programmatically place pixels on the screen. It does all of this by expecting you to specify simple (and often tedious) draw commands that mimic the path a pen would take on a piece of paper. It's not as boring as I am making it out to be, but it's no episode of [Game of Thrones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_of_Thrones) either.
>
>The [DOM vs. Canvas article](https://www.educative.io/collection/page/10370001/5712018204000256/5679720049934336/) gives you better idea of why the canvas does things the way it does.

DOM vs. Canvas

Getting Started with the Canvas

Drawing Basics / Lines

Drawing Curves

Drawing Multiple Things

Drawing Rectangles (and Squares)

Drawing Triangles

Drawing Circles

Modifying How Your Corners Look

Working with Colors

Drawing Text

Drawing Images

Canvas Transformations

Structuring Your Drawing Code

Animating with requestAnimationFrame

Creating Animations on the Canvas

Animating Many Things on the Canvas

Creating Motion Trails

Creating Sprite Animations

Working With the Mouse

Follow the Mouse Cursor

Mouse Follow with Ease

Working With the Keyboard

Moving Shapes Using the Keyboard

Resizing the HTML Canvas Element

Detect Whether a Font is Installed

Drawing Rectangles (and Squares) on the Canvas