I’m a little late (like, omgbbq, 2 months late) with this announcement, but here goes: I published my new book, called “React: Up and Running”. Go get it everywhere where books are sold and learn React from the ground up! I’ve been working with React for a while now and thought I have something to […]

So I’ll be publishing 5 books this year. Isn’t that incredible? Is it even possible? And good quality books at that? It’s a nice challenge (my last year’s challenge failed, I didn’t even bother to count how bad it failed). I think it’s possible, especially if you bend a little bit the meaning of “5”, […]

In the spirit of tooting one’s own horn…. Top 3 This morning I noticed my OOJS book is #3 in Amazon’s JavaScript category, wo-hoo! Then it dropped down but in the evening it’s up again. Nice company – OOJS, Doug Crockford’s book and David Flanagan’s giant Rhino JS book. Not that I’m obsessed with my […]

There’s a book promotion event this week at the JavaRanch’s HTML and JavaScript forum, ranchers are asking all kinds of interesting questions about my OOJS book. There will be a free book giveaway at the end of the week, so come in and join the fun. Yesterday my post count got from 0 to 15 […]

Finally! The wait is over! After people have already managed to read the book, the chef d’oeuvre that is my Object-Oriented Javascript and some have published 5 star reviews on Amazon, the author finally gets his copies. Oh, happy day! 15 copies, yeey. I don’t get to keep them all, because 10 are for my […]

Whew, after a whole year of writing, preparation, edits, blood, sweat, tears, I finished all the latest edits and reviews for my new book, Beginning Object-Oriented JavaScript. It should be out any day now. I can’t be happier! You can pre-order with 10% off from the publisher’s site.

When you write something: a book, an article, an email… cut out needless words. The copy after editing should be shorter. Writing is not speaking, it must be tighter. (And, if you find an email is getting longer, just phone the person, he’ll never read the email anyway) I’ve read somewhere Mark Twain was saying […]

A collection of writing tips here, includes advise from Stephen King, Paul Graham, Scott Adams and others. In the end, if you want to write well I believe it all boils down to: write – daily edit – cut out needless words read – everything you can lay your hands on It’s so simple and […]

A quick function to replace the selected text (in Firefox). Accepts: string to replace the selection, or callback function that takes the selected text and returns a string to replace the selection function replaceSelection(t) { if (typeof t === ‘function’) { t = t(window.getSelection().toString()); } var range = window.getSelection().getRangeAt(0); range.deleteContents(); range.insertNode(document.createTextNode(t)); } Usage: 1. Replace […]

Tip #1 for writing better code – edit. With this book I write, I find I’m spending more time editing than writing. The first draft is usually bad. The first draft “works” in the sense that it covers the material, but not necessarily in the best possible way. Same thing with writing code, it’s one […]

Something has been annoying me for some time as I write this book in Google Docs: I want to be able to format text as code (Courier New) only using the keyboard. So I came up with this bookmarklet. It’s one of those “works for me” so if it doesn’t work for you feel free […]

So close to being finished with 5 chapters and 1 appendix of the new book (hey, that’s 50%+) and just after the n-th edit of chapter 3, I thought I might share this picture I have on my desk. It’s an self-portrait of my 4yrs old daughter Zlatina, in front of a window. Once this […]

David Barnes, who works for my publisher Packt Publishing, has started a blog: “How to write computer books”. Great stuff in there. If you write or intend to write a book, a blog or anything technical, it’s a great addition to your RSS reader. Inspired by this quote from Mark Twain, yesterday I went through […]

I’ve never been into crime fiction. I mean I’ve read The Hound of the Baskervilles, but that’s about it. I like Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, looove Kurt Vonnegut, enjoyed On the Road, Catch-22… So it came as a surprise even to me when I started reading Raymond Chandler and actually enjoying it. The thing is […]