The Bungee Blog

By tomorrow evening, I should be looking at the final draft of the book.

It’s been adjusted according to the final Prototype 1.6.0 API (which we did, at long last, freeze this week) , it’s been through a first pass of copy editing (the major one), I processed that, and Daniel Steinberg, my editor, put in yet another pass. The last stage of the final draft is… getting the preface. Which should happen tomorrow.

Next week, the book gets professionally indexed (you have to love the index in any Pragmatic Bookshelf title), and then it’s on to typesetting. And then the final PDF is here. The rest is just printing and distribution: those who want the final content will be able to grab it directly online, on the book’s web page.

I’m anxious to see it out, almost to the point of giddiness.

Very soon now… Stay tuned.

Joe Hewitt himself seems always taken aback that his dear little extension is such a big deal to Web developers. As he once put it when chatting with me back in July at TAE West, “it’s just a bunch of scripts!”

Right.

I, like tons of other web devs, strongly believe that Firebug should be a critical implement in every serious web developer’s toolkit. It’s not just a “bunch of scripts,” it’s a cohesive, effective toolset able to spare us tens of hours of debugging-in-the-dark.

Still, I feel like lots of people under-use it dramatically. It’s not just the DOM-based HTML view, or the JavaScript debugger, or the console. It’s so much more. Perhaps that endemic under-use is due to the fact that a lot of people “learned” Firebug when it was in 0.4 or something, and didn’t quite take the time to delve into the countless improvements in 1.x.

So I’m glad to see so many docs pop up online, most of them pretty good and tutorial-like, so that more and more users get a chance to really squeeze the sweet power out of one of our most beloved extensions.

• Phil Rees, for example, as a developer of the Google Mashup Editor, uses a mashup creation demo as a story to go through many of Firebug’s critical features. I like the running-example approach, it just works well.
• Firebug’s website itself features quite a bunch of tutorials, demos and screencasts in its documentation section, which I urge you to read through.
• Michael Sync has been writing a series of tutorial articles on his blog, starting on September 8, 2007, which are also a good help.

There’s no good dynamic webapp development without Firebug, lads. Get on it for real.

And hats off to Joe.