New Book: Drupal 6 JavaScript and jQuery

As Linus Torvalds famously remarked, "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." What if we combined that kind of code-review mentality with the best of professional publishing practices in order to write better books? This is the idea behind a new program that Packt Publishing is running, and my newest book, Drupal 6 JavaScript and jQuery, is the first book through this new program.

The new book is focused on developing a richer client-side experience using Drupal 6 and the JavaScript libraries included with it (Yup, jQuery is one of those). I've done my best to build a book that will appeal to both themers and module developers. While it is heavy on JavaScript, there's not a lot of PHP. It covers behaviors, JavaScript theming, translations, AJAX technologies, Drupal functions, and lots and lots of jQuery.

But here's the novel part: Rather than going through the normal publishing cycle, Packt has created a new program called RAW (Read as we Write). A RAW book is published chapter by chapter. Soon after I finish writing a chapter, it is posted to the book site where subscribers can download and read it right away. While every chapter is totally complete (including all of the code samples), the book is unedited and unpolished. It's raw.

This has a few huge advantages.

First, it means that the content gets delivered in a most timely way. Technology moves quickly. Publishing moves (comparatively) slowly. It usually takes about a year to get from book proposal to published paperback (though I do know a guy who has been working on a tech book for eight years now). But with this system, readers get access to the material well in advance of publication. In this case, you can start grabbing chapters four or five months ahead of the official publication date.

Second, it means that we can collectively make the book better. Read a chapter, find an error, give feedback.* Quality documentation is a huge win for the community, and RAW gives us the advantage of both professional publishing and community transparency.

I'm very excited to have the first book through this process. Your input to Packt will determine how this sort of program continues in the future.

Since the acknowledgments for the book won't get completed until the very end, I do want to mention a few people here. Thanks to Gábor Hojtsy and Ariel Hitron for helping with the sections on the JavaScript translation system. Greg Knaddison and a few others organized DrupalCamp Colorado, which was the test bed for many of the ideas and examples in the book. John Forsythe, Doug Patterson, Leena Purkait and others were instrumental in helping me get the first couple of chapters into shape in time to start RAW. Larry Garfield, Ken Rickard, Greg Dunlap, John Wilkins, Sam Boyer and the rest of the Palantir team have (wittingly or unwittingly) been great sources of information. If this RAW program is a success, I anticipate having many more acknowledgments to add in here. Thanks to all!

* Please use the Packt feedback channel, and don't send me email. The idea is to make the most of an established editorial cycle. I lose email. My editors do not.