Translating Geek Into English
In this edition…
I last posted an update on my forthcoming JavaScript book, Modern JavaScript: Develop and Design, just over two months ago, so it’s high time I posted another update. Of course, I’ve been working so hard on the book that I haven’t done a very good job of putting out regular, good blog posts in the interim. Still, here’s where things stand…
The good news is that I just submitted the first draft of Chapter 10, “Working with Forms.” Although forms have been used to some degree since Chapter 2, “JavaScript in Action,” this chapter rounds out the knowledge of forms with respect to JavaScript. The chapter worked out much like a “recipe” type of chapter, with discussions of common tasks plus specific code for performing that task. Some of the examples are:
The chapter also covers regular expressions, with a focus on validation. Because regular expressions are complicated, and there’s already a lot of material in the book, I tried to keep the coverage as accessible as possible, without going into too much high-end stuff. The chapter ends with a good and realistic form validation example that combines most of the above.
Before Chapter 10, I finished Chapter 9, “JavaScript and the Browser,” and Chapter 8, “Event Handling”. Chapter 9 in particular was quite long. But now that I’ve covered events in detail, plus DOM manipulation, CSS interactions, and so forth, the possibilities have greatly expanded when it comes to what examples I can use, which makes writing the book easier and more rewarding. By this point in the book, the reader has also created a couple of mini-libraries that make things like event handler registration easy and cross-browser compliant. The book is continuing to emphasize–and demonstrate–progressive enhancement along the way.
I’ve also done the rewrites on the first four chapters and have seen the PDF layouts for the first two. This is my first full-color book and it looks great. Unfortunately, as seems to always happen with me, the page counts are coming back quite high. Between that and how grossly behind schedule I am, I’ll have to make some decisions as to what to keep in Part 3 of the book. Part 2 of the book, which is the meat, has two more chapters remaining: Ajax (Chapter 11) and Debugging and Error Handling (12). Part 3 of the book will definitely have one chapter on frameworks and another on advanced JavaScript programming. There will be at least one more chapter, but I’m not sure what that will be. Possible candidates are:
I’ve already decided not to do the server-side JavaScript chapter, as I don’t think that many people are doing server-side JavaScript yet, at least not among those that would be reading this book.
As always, if there’s not space to put something in the book, I’ll probably end up writing about those subjects here, or as articles elsewhere (so you’ll still get all the important content, you just won’t have to pay for it).
So that’s where things stand. Thanks to everyone for their interest in the book. Now I’m off to write Chapter 11!
I’ve recently come across a couple of free, public programming courses, as a series of videos, that may be of interest to those of you out there (I haven’t had the time to view many of the individual episodes, but they look promising).
The first is an Introduction to Computer Science and Programming, from an instructor at MIT. It’s definitely for beginners and although it uses Python as its primary language, the goal is to convey the fundamentals and the theories involved. It probably gets a bit too high-end for some, but worth taking a gander at regardless.
The second series is programming literacy’s Core units. This series is much more broad and covers a range of languages and topics. As I write this, the first six units have been completed and are available as YouTube videos, with downloadable PDFs (and other formats) for the slides and notes. On the other hand, the last one was finished about 20 months ago, so there may never be more in the series. Still, it’s approachable and I like that the materials are available for viewing separately. And the price is right!
Columbia University has a BreakWriting program that encourages students to write during their December-January semester break. Last year’s series of 16 posts have been put online and are well worth reading if you do any writing (or think about doing any). Each posting has oodles of useful, real-world advice, with plenty of tips and recommendations for being as successful as possible when it comes to writing (success here being measured in terms of actually writing, not commercial success).
Someone, I forget whom, shared with me these two good CSS resources, and I thought I’d pass them along. The first is Make CSS3 Buttons That Are Extremely Fancy and the article explains exactly that. I’m not a graphics person, so being able to do something using only CSS is great for me (and being told exactly what to do is even better). A benefit of CSS buttons is that the user does not have to download the additional resources of all those extra images, especially when you factor in images for different states (hover et al.).
The other resource is ProCSSor, a CSS prettifier. It’s just a utility that you can drop a slew of CSS into and it will clean it up as you’d like. It will even work on CSS in an uploaded file or located on a provided URL.
