As the title says, I’m working on a book. I signed the agreement yesterday so I’m finally be able to share the news with all of you. It’s been in the works for a while, so getting it to the point where it’s something I can talk about is a pleasure.

The book is with Manning Publications and the title is Mobile Web App Cookbook. As of right now, it looks like it’ll be out in the first half of 2012.

It’s going to be multi-author book dealing with, you guessed it, mobile web app development. I’m the lead author, setting the tone for the book and providing the framing chapters. As of now, I’m planning on introducing the factors driving mobile web app development; providing an in-depth examination of the full range of technologies in play and then wrapping up the subject in a closing chapter. In addition to my contribution, several other authors will provide detailed examples using technologies like Sencha Touch, jQuery Mobile and pure HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript.

It’s going to be a serious, technical introduction to an increasingly important branch of web development.

I’ll be sharing more details as I get them.

Why Mobile?

While I’m happy to be writing a book at all, I’m especially excited by the mobile focus of this project. To me, getting people and organizations excited about mobile web development and the continued evolution of the web platform is vital. I believe that a free and open web is a force for positive change in the world. For the web platform to remain viable and win out over app stores and other proprietary, closed ecosystems, people need to have the knowledge and tools to develop world class, cross-device applications for mobile devices. This book will help people do just that.

That’s pretty cool.

I read High Performance JavaScript when it came out. It took me a while to write this review.

I’ve been busy (day job x spending a lot of time outside because it’s summer = less time for writing)

Anyway, it’s really good. It’s short, but well-written and focused so it’s an easy book to dive into, digest and integrate into your day-to-day.

One of the things I liked about it is that the topics cover enough ground that even as an experienced/expert developer you can learn some things that you’ve probably never run into in a production environment. Maybe you haven’t dealt with a lot of heavy-duty string manipulation and regular expressions or possibly you haven’t done a ton with build systems. They’re covered here, by experts. You might not be an expert after reading it, but you’ll definitely have enough to go on to start working in some solid enhancements into your own code.

All in all, this is a recommended book for all intermediate to expert JavaScript developers. It will get you thinking about your own code, about convenience and about JavaScript performance in a very fundamental way. That’s good for you, for your users and for the web as a whole.

Here are the books that sit next to me at work.

No, there are no HTML or CSS books. I haven’t felt the need to dive into those subjects, in depth, since 1999. Based on the foundation I got from studying specs and experimenting in 1998-2000, I can read the occasional A List Apart article, look at Quirksmode and keep up to date.

I should add, I’m reading Dive Into HTML5 as it’s released. That’s what the first change in the specs in 10 years will do to a fellow.

In my “to read” pile:

Dive Into Python 3

I like Mark Pilgrim‘s writing, in general, and I want to learn more about Python.

Palm webOS

Read and build. Build and read. That’s my fall, I hope. With the new changes to their app distribution program, I’ve decided I’m going to do something open source.

Read the rest of this entry »