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.
