Categories
Books Writing

Writing from the bleeding edge

One of the challenges writing a book on technology is not only do you need to put words together in some form of coherent, possibly even interesting, manner, but you also have to understand the underlying technology enough to be able to explain it to others.

You can’t just “talk” about the technology, you have to understand it.

Not a problem, except when you’re getting into bleeding edge technology, like some of the ECMAScript 6 objects I’m covering in the second edition of my JavaScript Cookbook.

All you can do is work with the object, work with the object, and work with the object until you go from, “I hate this object. I hate this object. I really f**king hate this object” to, “Oh hey, this object isn’t so bad.”

Then you can write about it in the book.

Categories
Books JavaScript

JavaScript, not a ‘real language’

Simon St. Laurent and I have been discussing that exciting upcoming conference, DHTMLConf.

Party like golden sparkles following the mouse cursor is cool again!

If you’re going to JSFest, how can you not go to DHTMLConf? This is a conference celebrating a time when all of the technologies we take so seriously now, were fun!

Simon is going, and is taking along a copy of his old Dynamic HTML book he managed to find. That made me dig around online for anything on my old books, including my Dynamic HTML book (1998), as well as my earlier (1996) JavaScript How-To.

I had to laugh when I saw the marketing blurb attached to the JavaScript How-To book at Amazon:

JavaScript is the ultimate in web eye-candy. It is not a real programming language such as Java, and it isn’t really essential for web site development, but it sure is a lot of fun for tinkerers.

Categories
Books Critters

Sharing photos

Ringling Brothers: The Greatest Show in Court book coverThe photo for my newest book comes from Shutterstock. It’s not a perfect photo. It’s a little dark, a little blurry and out of focus. But no other image worked for the book. When I saw it, I knew this was the image I wanted for my cover. Authors get funny that way, which is why publishers rarely let us anywhere near the cover.

Thankfully, O’Reilly’s Director of Brand Management and expert on all things book covers, Edie Freedman, kindly volunteered to help me pummel the photo into shape. She also helped educate me on what makes a good book cover. For instance, I didn’t know about needing to leave space on all sides of the cover page. I also wasn’t aware that when you’re a relatively unknown author, as I am, you want to put your name at the top of the page; get a little name recognition going. She helped polish away many of the photo’s distractions, and find a font that, I think, really makes the cover snap—especially in smaller sizes, which is what shows up on Amazon pages.

The cover image is probably the only photo I’ll be using from Shutterstock in my book. Most of the images will come from the court case and investigations the book covers. The others are coming from photos at Flickr made freely available for use with a Creative Commons license. You can use a photo in a book, as illustration, if the CC license permits noncommercial use.

Some of the photos are from folks who have attended the Ringling Brothers circus or the associated animal walks. Others, though, come from the Circus collection of the Boston Public Library. This wonderful institution has not only uploaded extraordinary graphics and photos to its Flickr account, it kindly allows people like me to use the photos in a non-commercial setting (such as within a book for editorial or illustrative purposes). My favorite set of theirs is, of course, the one related to the circus.

I’ve always been reluctant about the Creative Commons license, not the least of which, the licenses are a bit confusing. For instance, it took me the longest time to figure out that using a photo as illustration within a book that isn’t focused on selling said photo is not a commercial use of the photo. Or at least, that’s the interpretation I’ve seen most frequently given, and the one I’m sticking with.

I can now see, though, why having a licensing scheme such as the Creative Commons is so helpful. It wasn’t necessary to have older photos and circus posters in the book…but the added color and history makes it more lively.

Old circus poster

I was so grateful to the Boston Public Library that I decided to upload all of my photos to my new Flickr account and offer them for use. The CC license I picked is very open, other than I restrict commercial use because I don’t have model releases for people and buildings and don’t want to hassle with the potential content copyright issues.

I’ve already had one of my photos used in a Missouri Department of Tourism pamphlet, for illustrative purposes. I don’t claim to be the best photographer in the world, and most of my photos are ordinary. But you never know when one of your photos might help someone, so I just uploaded them all, let folks use them or not.