Noel Rappin Writes Here

Ongoing update and stuff

I know, I haven’t been blogging much. I can always tell when I’m putting things off because the half-finished blog posts stack up.

First, Master Space and Time In JavaScript is still on sale, and for the moment it’s still $15. Somebody using the twitter handle @shakerdev just called it a “great fucking read for JS devs.” So, I’ve got that going for me.

The ongoing projects list looks like this:

Master Space and Time Book 4: Ember

Still caught in the tension between wanting — really wanting — to get this one done, and the fact that the Ember team keeps releasing cool new stuff and not going to a 1.0 final release.

I should mention, in the wake of some comments on line about Ember’s volatility and books, that no matter what else I wind up doing over the next few months, my plan is to continue to keep the Ember book current through at least Ember 1.0, and I hope somewhat beyond that.

My planned topic list hasn’t changed a ton:

• More on views and handlebar helpers
• Ember data details
• Ember-testing details
• The new async routing API — this will probably include a short section on promises, which may get promoted to book 1.
• I’d like to deal with some real-world examples, at least briefly, of things like authentication
• I also may switch from jasminerice to teaspoon as a test runner, which may also mean going back and retro-fitting earlier parts of the books.

Angular Update

Since I last blogged about this, I’ve taken one baby step towards an Angular book, namely getting a new branch up in the book’s code repo set with Angular. The goal is to create the basic admin console stuff similar to the Ember book example. If I feel like I can do that and explain it clearly, then I’ll start writing. I think the odds are at just over 50/50 that I’ll do it. If I do, it will probably go on sale as a beta in very early stages.

Project Book Update

I should probably put this higher, but it’ll get its own post in a week or two.

A while back, I casually mentioned on Twitter that I was thinking about writing about how to deal with projects. This met, I think it’s fair to say, with near-total indifference.

Nevertheless, I’m still doing it, because I want to write some of this stuff down. The book now has a title, a scratch cover, and about 15 pages written. Final length will probably be in the 120 page neighborhood, but who knows.

Full announcement, including the title, and cover and a way to be notified when it goes on sale, will come when I get to a) 25 pages and b) a coherent outline.

I’m very excited about this, I think it’s going to be good.

If you’ve ever worked on projects with people who are not you, this book will help you.

Pricing

If you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed that I was discussing book pricing with Jim Gay of Clean Ruby fame. This was in the context of a new Ember book from Giles Bokett, that is priced at $47.

It seems like Giles, at $47, and I, at $7, are both sub-optimal in terms of maximizing revenue from our Ember work. I generally err on the side of under-pricing my stuff though some combination of my own insecurity and also the idea that an inexpensive book is accessible to more people.

Still, there’s erring on the side of inexpensive, and then there’s not having confidence in the value of your work. The full set of Master Space and time With JavaScript is going to be about 125 - 150% the length of Rails Test Prescriptions for less than 2/3 of the price. (And yes, I know that page length isn’t really a marker for anything. Still…)

Which is a long winded way of saying that the price of MSTWJS will be going up, with the actual date being either a) the draft-complete version of the Ember book, b) the first beta release of the Ember book over 120 pages (currently at 94), or c) the on-sale date of a currently-mythical Angular book. Exact pricing still TBD, though I’m still open to argument. I’ll probably also add some kind of workaround for students and others for whom the price is a hardship — not sure what that will look like yet.

Finally

Buy the book, please: Master Space and Time In JavaScript.