That's a fair question.
The type of application can dictate the type of technology you'd use. For example, for a card game like Poker, you might want to use Canvas or SVG. WebGL would be overkill and possibly reduce the number of people that could use it because it has higher requirements. SVG manages state in the DOM (Document Object Model) so that can help with clicking and stuff like that. Canvas requires you to manage all this stuff on your own.
In the samples for the book, you can see both methods, a SVG card game using RaphaelJS and a Canvas based game using Amino. (
https://github.com/jwill/html5-game-book) Amino is an interesting library but it doesn't seem to be well supported at the moment. I'm looking at a bunch of others but can't suggest one at the moment. I suggest you learn the basics before using a framework because it will help you patch and modify the framework if need arises.
Writing the book:
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Dropbox and Google Docs There is no excuse not to write.
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Aptana Studio/ Eclipse / Vim Depending on my mood I would flip between those to write code. I believe Aptana was merged into Titanium Appcelerator recently.
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Word Some publishers require documents in Word format. I tried to push that to as late as possible in the process.
