classical geek

before	after

I’m hanging out at the JavaRanch saloon this week answering questions about the new book, and very excited I am to see it in print at last. One reader has asked me this morning why the book changed it’s name from ‘P & S Quickly’ to ‘P & S in Action’ at the last minute, and the Sgt. Pepper lookalike on the cover (see right) acquired a pair of legs in the process. So, let me tell you the story behind that.

I’d started using the Prototype & Scriptaculous libraries in my production code, and realised that they were changing the way that I wrote Javascript. Not just that I was using a new API, but that the authors of these libraries had really figured out how Javascript worked as a language, and had created a set of tools that allowed very fluid and expressive code. As with “Ajax in Action”, my primary motivation for writing was to chronicle my own journey as a coder, and I thought this would be a good subject for a book. Manning’s ‘Quickly’ series are intended to be short and focused, and that was what I had originally planned to write.

As the journey progressed, I realised that there was a lot of context around these libraries. To grok Prototype, you need to grok Javascript’s closures, object literals and other language features, so I ended up writing a comprehensive overview of Javascript the language (something I’d always meant to do, but not necessarily on this project).
Scriptaculous is all about useability and ease of use, so I felt the book needed something about that too. And when exploring Ajax (little Ajax, the request-response bit, as oposed to big Ajax, the whole shooting match), I wanted to measure the impacts of different solutions on network traffic, and render them as charts, so I show you how to do that too.

All of these serve to explain P & S more fully - I’m not interested in writing a dry API guide, I want to explain why the libraries exist, and how you can use them in the real world. But, having done all of this, with a great deal of help from Bear, and latterly Tom, the book was no longer ‘Quick’. And so, Prototype & Scriptaculous in Action was born.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 27th, 2007 at 10:37 pm and is filed under Tech, Ajax. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.