Jun30
Practical Prototype & script.aculo.us: the book
Against all odds, I have written a book designed to familiarize the reader with Prototype and script.aculo.us.
How am I supposed to convey how hard this was? I’d say it was like giving childbirth, but the process itself took much longer than it takes to grow a baby.
Why did it take so long? First: unlike a baby, which grows at a steady pace whether you like it or not, a book is all too easy to put off when you’ve got a full-time job.
Second: unlike a baby, which will claw its way out at a date of its own choosing, a book’s natural tendency is to languish. Mine settled into a valley when it was roughly 60% complete; rather than redouble my efforts in order to get it over the hump, I sat on the couch and pretended it didn’t exist for a while.
So don’t misunderstand me: I’m not suggesting I have some knowledge of childbirth that allows me to empathize. I’m only saying that the process of writing my book was far more painful and, as a result, has far more meaning.
I am humbly indebted to everyone at Apress for making this possible — especially Beth Christmas and Clay Andres, who helped me get off my perfection pedestal and get the damned thing out the door. Anyone else would’ve ditched the albatross long ago.
I am also grateful to Aaron Gustafson for being my technical editor. He had to ensure my code examples worked even while the APIs for the final version of Prototype 1.6 were changing almost daily.
And, of course, I am grateful to Christophe Porteneuve, author of the excellent Pragmatic Programmers book on Prototype/script.aculo.us, for his enthusiasm and occasional guidance. Some may view our books as being in direct competition. I say: why not buy both?
You can get a glimpse of Chapter 1 at the Apress web site, and Ajaxian has Chapter 4. The rest you’ll have to pay for, so head over to Amazon.
Jun25
If I were the benevolent dictator, I would make it capital offense for members of the punditocracy to opine ignorantly about the tastes and habits of “regular people,” who apparently have comfort zones no larger than their footprints, and who are unwilling to vote for anyone who doesn’t live their lives exactly like they (are imagined to) do.
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Jun17
Because we all know where black teenage males in the hood get their inspiration from — famous middle-aged people. I’ll never forget when I was a kid and everyone was in those Cosby sweaters… man, that was a hot-ass summer.
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Jun3
Quoth Michael Arrington: “Kind of takes the air out of the balloon when you can’t get them riled up.” In other words: the answer is still yes.
(0)Jun2
When writers purport to educate readers about complex matters, and they are arguably wrong, I think The Times cannot label it opinion and let it go at that.
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May26
People who write about very specific things, I’ve found, often have the most interesting things to say. Steven Levithan writes Flagrant Badassery, which covers JavaScript and regular expressions. Steven’s XRegExp library does some killer stuff that the native JS RegExp does not; at only 2.4KB, it’s a must-have for grepping and/or parsing on the client side.
May13
Gabe essentially began anti-anxiety medication and planned a trip for Paris in the same week, possibly even in the same moment, and as an observer — it is literally my job to observe — this was an intriguing process. He wasn’t yet ensorcelled by the chemical, and yet with full awareness of his own agony he went through the previously unthinkable process of putting all this together. It must have been something like jumping from a plane with a strange backpack and a pamphlet entitled “Your Parachute.”
May7
Chris Mills looks at Dragonfly, Opera’s new Firebug-ish developer panel. It’s not Firebug, but it’s much closer thereto than the competition from IE and Safari.
May6
Mark says it best, once again. Mozilla’s absence from the Cannonball Run–style race to comply with Acid 3 was disappointing. They’d have come in third place, but that’s not the point. If you play, you win. If you make excuses, grumble about the rubric, or quibble over minutiae, you lose.
Apr25
It’s never an encouraging sign when a film about the murder of John Lennon has audiences rooting for the climactic shooting, just so a dreary, sordid, worthless film will come to a merciful end.
