Pro Single Page Application Development – Writing a Book
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
A few months ago Ido sent me a mail that Apress asked him if he want to write a book about Single Page Applications. Because Ido is more server oriented, he thought that this book writing is more suitable to me. When I got Ido’s mail about the opportunity to write a book, I was excited. You probably don’t know that I already written 4 books but those books are part of 4 different Microsoft Official Courses (MOCs). That means the books aren’t sold anywhere and you get them only if you are participating a MOC. This was the first time that a book I’m going to write will be sold on sites like Amazon. This was also the first time that my name will be on a book cover (in MOCs you will find the author names in page 7 inside the book).
Since I know what it takes to write a full book and because Ido brought the book lead in the first place, I decided that I’ll co-author the book with Ido. I was charge on the front-end writing and Ido on the backend writing. Ido agreed to co-author the book and we started the process. The first thing that we did was to write a suggestion for Apress that included the title, description, audience, chapters names, chapters’ sub topics and more. We divided the writing as follows – I was in charge of 9.5 chapters about the front-end and Ido was in charge of the other 3.5 chapters which deal with the backend. After the suggestion was approved by Apress board, we signed the book contract and got to the main business – writing the book. We got a great editor, Gwenan Spearing, and a coordinating editor, Christine Ricketts, to help managing the time table, chapter delivery and content quality.
During November and December I succeeded to write most of my chapters. I covered a lot of topics that I already knew very well and taught in JavaScript courses like Building Scalable JavaScript Apps. You will find in the book a lot of tips and notes that I hope will help you do the right decisions when you write an SPA front-end. You will also find a lot of content on SPA concepts and architecture along with a lot of JavaScript goodies. I tried to make the chapters very concise and hopefully succeeded in that.
Writing can be very cumbersome and sometimes I had writing blocks that slowed the writing process. On the other hand, I knew exactly what I’m going to write and how to write it so I made a lot of progress and fast. At the end of December, I finished writing all the drafts for my chapters and started to get reviews from our technical reviewers: Konstantin Kutepov and Fabio Claudio Ferracchiati. If you don’t know the process of writing a technical book, it starts with a technical review. In this phase another expert go over your drafts and review them. After each review, I added more content and fixed some things that needed to be fixed. Sasha Goldstein, SELA CTO, also offered to review the book so I sent him the drafts and got a few valuable comments that helped to improve the book.
Right now most of my chapters are going a copyedit phase. Because I’m not a native English speaker, a copy editor is going over my chapters and fix grammar or other English problems. At the end of this process I go over the copyedit chapter and figure if the changes changed the meaning of what I wrote. Once this phase is over the chapters are ready for production.
All in all, writing a book is very hard and demanding and it includes a lot of long writing nights. I hope that once you will read the book you will appreciate the hard work and all the effort that was invested in the book.
