One interesting corner of HTML5 development is web-based games. With a few well placed canvases and a healthy does of Javascript, you can create just about any game you can dream. However, the complex nature of Javascript has created the need for a few companies to release game engines built entirely in Javascript and HTML5. This is where Pulse comes in.

Another year has come and gone, which means it's time for us to look back at 2011 and see what happened. This year marks the fifth anniversary of Switch On The Code and so far every year has been better than the last.

In February we saw our first ever month of 500k pageviews, and for the most part traffic has held steady ever since. We ended the year with an amazing 5.6 million pageviews - a 10% increase over the previous year.

As we learned in our Regular Expressions Primer, regular expressions can be simple or extremely complex. However, there are a few concepts that were left out. Today we are going to cover one of those concepts... grouping.

Pattern recognition is a very hard thing to get right, and as a developer it can be as easy as a few lines of code or more than you can count with fingers and toes. Today we are going to go over a very common tool used for text pattern recognition: regular expression. So let's get started and dive right in.

HTML5 is pretty much the web 3.0 standard these days, and there are plenty of neat neat HTML5 tutorials out there to prove it. In fact, there are even a few game engines out there that are built for HTML5. A recent development in this area was the release of the Pulse developer preview. Here is a short demo of what is possible with pulse:

Learning to program is hard and one of the ways to make the process easier is by reading and using books. With our book reviews here at Switch On The Code we try to help you figure out which books are the best for any level of developer. In this review I'm going to go over the iOS game programming book Learning Cocos2D - A Hands-On Guide to Building iOS Games with Cocos2D, Box2D, and Chipmunk. written by Rod Strougo and Ray Wenderlich.

I am sure we all have been at a point when we need to highlight something, and most note taking or sharing software allows you to pick and color and go selection crazy. Luckily, however, it is actually surprisingly easy to get a selection and highlight it with Javascript.

We here at Switch On The Code have been working with and playing around with the HTML5 canvas element. So, today's tutorial is going to build on top of the previous Image drawing tutorial and show you how to rotate drawn images, or really whatever you want.

The Canvas element was introduced a few years ago as part of the HTML 5 standard. This element has opened the doors to incredibly dynamic web applications that in the past were only possible using 3rd party plugins like Flash or Java. This tutorial covers a small but important piece of the canvas element - displaying and manipulating images.

It's been a while since we've done a book review, and it's time to rectify that. In this installment I'll be reviewing The Big Nerd Ranch's Guide to iOS Programming (2nd Edition). The Big Nerd Ranch has created a series of books around Mac, iOS, and Objective-C programming. This book is the latest in that series.