Noel Rappin Writes Here

Now that the new book is public, I’m going to start doing more frequent status updates. It’s going to be weird for me, after keeping the project under wraps for so long, but I’m sure we will all get by.

When the book, shall we say, reverted back to me, I had two immediate questions: what to write, and how to deliver it to a (hopefully) desiring public. Let’s talk about the content first, though in practice, I needed to make sure I had a tool chain I liked before proceeding.

At peak length, the manuscript was about 150 PDF pages, give or take, comprising something like 60% of my outline. Great! Ready to start selling. Except for a few things:

• Because the last few months consisted of a few different writing experiments on different parts of the book, the pages that I have aren’t consistent.
• Some of the text was started but not finished once review became more important… There is a chapter or two that I haven’t even read in months.
• Plus, life marches on. Ember.js wasn’t even a thing when I started, now I’m increasingly feeling like I need to cover it.
• The existing code is in an XML-esque format, and my preferred toolchain starts with Markdown.

Those points are all annoyances. The real problem is harder to articulate. Maybe the best way to put it is that the review process made me kind of cautious when writing, and that the book needs to be bolder and more sure of itself in order to succeed.

So the content part of the last week has involved writing a new, short introduction, I think I’ll probably revisit that once I have more of the rest of the book in place. I’ve also started transporting the first real chapter, but it’s more of a re-imagining than a copy and paste.

The way the book is set up, it uses the Time Travel Travel Agency example I’ve used in a couple of workshops — hence, the name — and you are contacted by a possibly time-traveling client who asks you to continually make JavaScript changes to his application. It’s a little silly, but I like it, and it keeps some focus on writing JavaScript in a real, if smallish, application. I’m refocusing the content on teaching good BDD practices, part of what I’m doing right now is trying to balance learning BDD with learning the JavaScript.

And that’s where I am. I’ll keep updating status regularly. If this interests you, remember to sign up.