Noel Rappin Writes Here

Here is the state of the Master Space and Time With JavaScript Union as a I currently understand it.

First, you can, you know, buy the book. Please.

An update to the Ember book should be going out next Monday or so. It has about 10-15 page chapter walking through a routing example with outlets and nested routes and the like. That’s puts the Ember PDF at just over 90 pages (including the back matter and contents and stuff), which compares favorably with the lengths of the other three books (97, 97, and 120, I think).

I think there are still a few things missing from the Ember book.

• More on views and handlebar helpers
• Ember data details
• Ember-testing details
• Anything else the Ember team adds before 1.0 (async routing, for example)
• I’d like to deal with some real-world examples, at least briefly, of things like authentication

This points to a final page count roughly in the range of the backbone book, about 120 pages or so. Actually, probably more. Sheesh.

What’s tricky about this is that ember-data and ember-testing are still not quite done enough to write about them without risking throwing everything out and starting over, so it’s hard to give a final schedule.

The other books are quiet at the moment, though the Backbone book could stand an edit.

Thinking Ahead

Meantime, there’s a slow but steady trickle of requests for a MSTWJS Book 5: Angular. (A five part trilogy would make me feel like Douglas Adams)…

I’m genuinely not sure if I’m going to do this. The considerations are:

Opportunity. There’s clearly some space here for a book that really explains Angular. According to a Twitter poll — which I’m sure is totally reliable — the overwhelming majority of existing MSTWJS customers would expect to pay for a Book 5. This actually goes a long way toward making me think this is worth my time. Writing tech books is kind of a hobby for me, but I’d still like to feel that I can make a little bit of money from them.

On the other hand, I’ve been working on this book for two years now. That’s a long time in Internet years, and doing an Angular version probably means another three to six months of work. There are other things I want to write, and it wouldn’t kill me to blog regularly again. (Actually, that implies that I once blogged regularly, which is not really true.) I really want to do this project book, and I’m starting to feel like I have new things to say about testing.

Anyway, right now I’m thinking that I’ll at least play with Angular a bit to see if I have any affinity for the tool at all. If I hate working with it, I’m not writing about it. If it passes that hurdle, then we’ll see.

If I do it, the likely scenario would be — don’t hold me to this, I’m just thinking out loud: * Priced at $7 or $9 based on length * Existing 4 book bundle owners would get a discount, possibly a limited time discount depending on what I can do via DPD. * At that point, new customers would get a five book bundle. I might raise all prices at that point — the hypothetical five book bundle would be nearly 600 pages. Not sure what that pricing looks like yet. $9 per book with a $25 bundle is one possibility.

Please let me know if you have thoughts about this — my perception of people’s willingness to buy an Angular book in this series is a major factor in whether I do it.

And, oh yeah, buy the book.

Thanks.