Julio's Blog

TL;DR - I can’t sell you something I personally don’t believe in.

I’ve recently emailed Manning and informed them of my decision of not going ahead with writing a book, reverting from my original decision. For those who missed the discussion on Twitter a while ago, the title was going to be “Building Well-Structured JavaScript Applications”. I was approached by them about 3 months ago with the proposal after my presentation on Backbone.js at SydJS. At first I thought it was an extremely attractive idea, perhaps because the prospect of being a published author would ultimately bring on good things.

And then it struck me: I just never read computer/IT books. I spent about 80% of my time reading source code, and the rest is split between reading articles and the occasional README. GitHub is my playground, and I need to get my hands dirty if I’m to learn anything. I often advise other developers to do the same, in detriment of time spent reading books.

It also struck me that, from the perspective of the author, writing a book more or less translates into a similar kind of outcome than to writing open source software: you’ll learn from it, and you’ll gather some attention, in exchange for massive amounts of your personal time. While the outcomes can be significant in a best case scenario, these days I much prefer the approach that projects such as DocumentCloud and other companies take, where byproducts of their work are open sourced. That’s what I call the best of both worlds, and that’s where I want to be in.

My workshop, in contrast, proved to be an extremely valuable exercise, for both myself and the attendees (hey, the survey results were great!). People came and learned in one day what would’ve taken them easily a week to get to the same point if they had to get that information from a book. I can endorse that, but I can’t endorse investing that much time being required for one to just get a grasp of something that, as a matter of fact, it’s a simple subject.

Final, I think computer books are getting a good run for their money in the age of the web. Books are now competing with an endless flurry of atomic pieces of information. You can’t beat that, nor should you want to. Exceptions apply, but HTML/JS/CSS books are not among those.