Noel Rappin Writes Here

Okay, the blog has been very quiet for the last month or so. Please be polite and pretend you noticed. I’ve alluded online to a new book one or two places and now I think it’s far enough along that I can mention it in public without being too scared.

Let’s do this Q&A style, call it an infrequently asked question list…

Q: What’s the new book?

A: Great question. The working title is Getting Things Done In JavaScript. That may not be the final title. My proposed titles, Enough JavaScript to Get By and JavaScript for People who Hate JavaScript were (rightly) deemed unsuitable.

Q: Okay. That’s the title. What’s the book?

A: Here are some excerpts from my proposal:

• The intended audience are developers used to doing back-end development, probably but not necessarily in Rails, who are increasingly asked to move functionality to the client, and are not familiar with the best JavaScript tools available for the job.

• This book is aimed at developers who are explicitly working on front ends for web applications and looking for guidance on how to approach the simple parts first and the complex parts as needed. In my head, this is triangulated with three non-JavaScript books that I think are around that level: Beck’s Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns, Olsen’s Eloquent Ruby, and Valim’s Crafting Rails Applications.

• Everything is test-driven. This book will contain more Jasmine than a Disney princess convention.

Does that help? Put another way, it’s the JavaScript book I wanted to hand our last apprentice when he asked for a good guide to JavaScript. Another way I’ve described the audience is people who have poked at JavaScript a few years ago, just got back into it, and aren’t quite sure why everything is an anonymous function these days. I’ve also called it JavaScript: An Idiosyncratic Guide, as in the thing you use after you have the information in the definitive guide.

Q: Why a book on JavaScript?

A: Because I was a guy who poked at JavaScript a few years ago, just got back into it, and wasn’t quite sure why everything is an anonymous function these days…

Well, that’s part of it. I felt like it was an area where I had something to offer, and where I could leverage the time that I had spent getting back into the latest and greatest JavaScript tools and make it easier for others to do the same.

Q: When can I buy it?

A: The initial draft is maybe 1/3 done. Ish. The hope is to get it available in beta sometime in November, and given the schedule that Pragmatic likes for books these days, to have the final come out something like January. That’s still an aggressive schedule, and I’m probably just a smidge behind, but I have a decent idea where I want it to go, and I’m making steady progress.

Q: What’s actually in the book?

A: The outline is still a bit in flux, but the basic idea is to take a pure server-side application and bit-by-bit move features to the client-side in a slow and not-even-a-single-tiny-bit-contrived way. The JavaScript topics are largely focused on creating what passes for objects, so there’s discussion of the object model, functions and scope, and the like – it’s not (at least at the moment) a tutorial on the basics of JavaScript. There’s a lot of jQuery, and a lot of Jasmine, and there will also be jQuery UI, jQuery Mobile, and Backbone.

That’s the story. Coming soon to a theater near you. Hope you like it.