Embiggening the MooTools Book
So Apress, publisher of my book on MooTools, has kindly asked me to consider upgrading it from their “firstPress” imprint to their main Apress book line. This would involve adding more content to it among other things.
So I’m curious. To those of you out there who have read the book, what do you wish were different about it? What do you wish there were more of? When you finished it, what lingering questions were still on your mind?
Do tell.
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November 18th, 2008 at 11:39 am
How exciting! I’m going to check the building for the book. If I’m lucky, maybe you left a copy here.. :D
November 18th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
Hey Aaron, i read your book a while back and its not that i didnt like it, its just that i didnt learn anything new from it. I felt it was too similar to the docs on the website. If you had to revise/add more content to the book, I would be leaning towards more real life examples. Things that developers can use on a day to day basis. I also like to stream line my code, i.e. using 3 lines of code instead of 10. I know i would personally benefit if you had a shortcuts or tip’n'tricks section.
November 18th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
That’s a good suggestion. I’ll add it to my outline. Keep the ideas comin’.
November 18th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Hi Aaron, Firstly: thanks for the book, I had to wait a few months here in the Netherlands after I ordered it before I finally got my hands on it because of the print on demand publication and the international difficulties of delivery, but I was very happy to have bought it. I had just switched to MooTools when v1.2 came out after trying prototype for a while and I was very happy to find your website and still enjoy all your contribution to MooTools. I enjoyed the book as a nice reference and fun read, especially some of the more less obvious insights. I agree with the second comment that extending the current content with some more in-depth development approaches would be a recommended extra. One little idea is for example some analysis of the MooTools code to assist us mediocre developers in a more advanced approach. I would love some more object oriented examples, more elaborate or advanced selector examples and more conceptual approaches relating to ajax requests. Good luck with your decision and your work, Victor
November 18th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
Thanks for the feedback Victor. This is great stuff.
November 19th, 2008 at 9:12 am
Aaron, I’ve already voiced my opinion (via Iminta and email) that your book had some great points. Particularly interesting to me were those clarifying usage and showing examples of writing reusable classes vs simply re-documenting things.
The main thing that irked me was no index. I have no way of quickly jumping to a subject that’s not a header or knowing generally where to look in the book.
Short of tips & tricks business already mentioned above that’d be my main suggestion.
November 19th, 2008 at 9:45 am
Well, the “upgrade” would move it from the “firstPress” format to their standard format, which would include an index, so that’s a bonus.
November 27th, 2008 at 11:36 pm
I read the book, it took most topics further than the docs, but I would like to see a super ninja moo section that has advanced examples, more ideas on extends and snippets. You know maybe a chapter to inspire ideas, a fringe js section if you will. I love the Clientcide plugins also Uvumi Tools is coming up on their own too. Now there is an idea, you could select the top 50 most awesome extentions/plugins/ideas that are out there for moo and do like 3 sentences on each.
Well, you asked for ideas… :)
- Daniel
November 29th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Another good suggestion. My outline is starting to come together for this. I’ll post it for feedback sometime in the next week or so.