Noel Rappin Writes Here

I’m pleased and more than a little surprised to be announcing the existence of Rails Test Prescriptions 2, (which may not be the final title). You have questions. Even if you don’t, I have answers. Can you give the news in the style of a movie poster tag line? Sure. Coming in 2014. It’s time to get your prescription… refilled. Rails Test Prescriptions 2: The re-prescriptioning. When did this happen? Really, just last week.

Here’s where we are at the moment. Master Space & Time With JavaScript: Ember I think I may have finally gotten my head around the Ember release plans. My current understanding is that: A 1.0 final release of core ember is imminent, possibly as soon as September 1. There’s another major overhaul of Ember-data (the “jj-abrams” reboot branch), which will become the master branch sometime between now and the 35th of Octvember.

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:

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).

It’s been well over a month since the last official update to Master Space and Time with JavaScript, and since I was hoping to get updates out more-or-less weekly, it’s probably a good idea to check in and let you know what’s going on. (Could be worse, though, I’m still hoping to post my top 10 books I read list. From 2011.) All of the MSTWJS customers out there have been either very patient in waiting for the next update, or you are completely disengaged.

Here’s a quick status update on Master Space and Time With JavaScript, book 3… Short version: expect an early beta of about 1/3 of the book to be out in about a week. Longer version: Work is proceeding steadily, the current draft of just hit 30 pages toward a target of around 90, though about 10 of that is the same intro and outro that the other books have, so it’s more like 20 pages toward a target of 80.

And now for a more inside-baseball post about how the self-publishing aspects of Master Space and Time With JavaScript are going. Did you know you can buy it? Short answer: Pretty well, though I could always have done better. Still unclear how this will work over the long haul. At this point, the book has been on sale for 10 days, plus the pre-sale to people who were on the mailing list.

I have a new book, Master Space and Time With JavaSript. You can buy it. Here’s the secret origin. This all started over a year ago. Rails Test Prescriptions had been complete for a few months, and I was getting a little antsy to take on a new project. But what? I wanted it to be a project where I would learn something, and I wanted it to be something where I had a particular perspective to offer.

There is a plan. It goes like this: Master Space and Time With JavaScript will be split into four parts. Part one and part two will be available sometime in July. I’d say July 1st, but I’ll still be in Scotland. It’d be sooner, but there are still logistics to be managed around the actual layout of the book and getting the payment gateway in order. Plus, I need to actually finish the text.

It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that I’ve been writing the same two or three chapters for six months. I think — I hope — this is the last time. This is a more or less weekly update on the manuscript currently known as Master Space & Time in JavaScript. Today, the update is about the first few chapters and how they change over time. These chapters cover a lot of ground, and getting the order and beats right has been a struggle.

Next up on the Master Space and Time With JavaScript status report is the workflow that takes my words and turns them into a PDF. And an HTML file. And an ePub. And don’t forget Kindle. As you can imagine, this is something of a minefield, although there are a lot more tools available than there were three years ago when I did this the last time — here’s an overview of the process I used then.

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.