Burningbird

This week is the last week for editing on the new book, and the editors are just now finishing up. I wanted to thank the folks who gifted me with their time and effort; providing reviews, technical and other editing, and suggestions. I had a good group of people and the book is going to be a superior product based on their effort:

Roger Johansson of 456 Berea Street was spot on with CSS, issues related to accessibility, as well as general markup and page design. He also managed to catch numerous typos.

Elaine Nelson of Emergency weblog provided not only tech editing, but also did an excellent job of content editing.

Roy Owens — not the singer. Roy also helped me on Learning JavaScript. Some people are gluttons for punishment.

Anne Zelenka of Anne 2.0 provided a higher level analyst view, as well as spotting gotchas, areas of confusion, and points of information that should have been included, but weren't.

Jesse Skinner, from The Future of the Web who is an expert on unobtrusive Ajax, and is currently working on a Short Cut for O'Reilly on unobtrusive Ajax. Jesse specifically focused on the tech, and his extensive knowledge of the Ajax world was extremely valuable.

Anthony Holdener, who is writing O'Reilly's Definitive Guide to Ajax, contributed edits for the first three chapters until he had to return to his book. I appreciate the extra effort.

Kathy Sierra, of Creating Passionate Users did a first chapter review and provided some excellent insight into refocusing the first chapter and making important points more discernible.

My main editor, Simon St. Laurent, of course. This is my third book with Simon. Did I mention, gluttons for punishment?

It is a lot of work to review a tech book. You're not just reading the book, you're:

• looking for typos
• looking for missed opportunities
• watching out for uses of technology that could be improved
• watching out for uses of technology that really need to be improved
• helping to discover areas where the author has made a mistake (all authors make mistakes)
• helping to sooth and tame wild, clumsy, and agitated phrases
• doing all of this within the constraints of an awkward book template, under deadline, with an overly tired author

The editing team for a book is the author's only support in what is a difficult task. They form the parachute when we're free falling; the additional sets of eyes when our own are tired and strained. Of course, the editing team can also only do so much: in the end, whatever is missed is ultimately the responsibility of the author.

Thank you. Thank you all most sincerely, from the bottom of my book writing heart.

I just uploaded the largest chapter, 9, and had hoped to get 10 loaded tonight, but my mind isn't working well. Aha, I though, write in the weblog instead.

This has been such a difficult book in more ways than one. The examples were huge and now, during editing, I have to find some way to cut them down to size; or at least trim that which shows in the book.

There are so many factors complicating the examples and the writing: cross-browser differences, quirks, IE, memory leaks, XHTML doctypes, IE, markup, CSS, JavaScript, etc etc IE etc. Then there are the issues of graceful degradation so that an application works with scripting turned off, making the code unobtrusive, and most importantly, making it accessible. Testing with JAWs, with Windows Eyes, not even sure how to use the applications.

The examples must also be exciting, fresh, innovative, and fun. Sparkly, hip, fashionable. Attractive, clean, impressive. Efficient and secure. Optimized and compartmentalized. Leave Web 2.0 in the dust of my passing.

I had a wonderful time with Chapter 8 and advanced CSS and SVG and Canvas–what a kick. I really like my database examples, and I think I've made some good, solid points throughout the book. I've touched on all the major components, demonstrated the major libraries, but provided most of the code. There's booze in it, but no sex.

My biggest concern? I don't write JavaScript like it's Ruby.