The Bungee Blog

A reader just brought an issue with the book’s Builder demo (chapter 17) to my attention.

The code that ships with the demo essentially grabs code pieces from the page itself, where they are displayed in table cells, to run this code live and display its result. In doing so, it attempted to go the extra mile and strip single-line comments from the code before eval‘ing it; it isn’t mandatory, it just felt cleaner at the time.

However, the regular expression used b0rks on IE7. I’m surprised nobody alerted me to that in almost 7 months since the book’s final release…

To get it to work in IE7, simply strip the clean-up line from the code. That’s the following line:

code = code.replace(/^\s*\/\/.*$/mg, '');

This will work just fine on all browsers now.

Thanks to Bharat for the heads up!

The original 5,000 paper copies are just about sold out, and channels keep asking for more! So I’m happy to announce Pragmatic Programmers just triggered a reprint of 3,000 more copies.

Thanks to everyone for grabbing the book, I hope you’re loving it!

For the past 24h or so, this web site was not accessible, due to a principle of precaution when some potential security issues arose, in order to protect the visitors’ privacy.

Unfortunately, this coincided with a major office rush, hence the long fix.

Thanks for hanging in, and welcome back.

Welcome to this fifth installment of Neuron Workout Solutions™, a series that answers the questions and challenges at the end of many chapters in the book. Today we’ll address the challenges closing chapter 10: More Useful Helper Objects. And with this, we’ll wrap up the Neuron Workouts for the Prototype part of the book. The next installment will begin the challenges about script.aculo.us!

Read more

In the mail this evening:

Hi Christophe,

I found your name through some links, where I started out using some javascript. Through a chain of events we have incorporated (to the best of our abilities) some coding that I believe started with an affiliate company you did work with “Prototype”.

run away!

Talk about not knowing what the hell you’re talking about.

Thanks to channel sales (sales not directly from Pragmatic Programmers, such as through their website), all of a sudden I see the book hit the 5,000 bought-copies (paper and PDF included) mark.

Woah.

And there are, currently, about 50 subscribers to this blog’s feed. Slightly below 1% of the buyers. The top 1%, obviously: you want fresh info in addition to the book’s contents, don’t you? I already outlined what this blog would have (and indeed, it should feature its first Neuron Workout post within 2 days), but what is it you guys expect to find here?

At any rate, uh, “thanks for watching.” As they say.

Here it is. At least in my part of the world, so there are still up to 10.5 hours for you, my dear readers, to enter 2008. What are you doing reading this in 2007? You should be gearing up for the celebration!

2008 is poised to be an exceptional year. In the JavaScript world alone, a number of very exciting things are coming, starting with a crystallization of ES4, but also plenty of cool client-side web technologies about storage, SVG, mashups, extensions of XHR, and much, much more!

And of course, 2008 will see Prototype 2.0 and script.aculo.us 2.0. We’re not keen on announcing release dates, but with “2008,” I certainly feel safe enough Work on “Scripty2″ is already very well on its way, and we have a number of sharp ideas for Proto2 as well.

I’ll make sure you know about the new, cool, exciting features that we’re cooking up.

In the meantime, here’s to a fabulous 2008 for you and your loved ones. Make it worth every minute!

Here it is! The paper book apparently crossed the Pond in a few less days than expected, for I received my first author copy today! There’s really nothing for it: holding the thing in one’s hands is an altogether different sense of achievement, as an author, from perusing the PDF.

I hope you’re all getting your own copies delivered; all pending shipments had been processed on Tuesday last week, so hopefully you all got your copies in this holiday season!

Happy holidays to you all, and let’s start a Proto/Scripty-rich 2008.

Hi all,

Just a couple things you might like to know about:

• The book is finally shipping in paper form!  It started yesterday, after a few delays PragProg experienced in actually getting the prints delivered to their warehouses (or so I gather). So although you may not receive it in time for Christmas (although U.S.-based readers should, I guess), it’s on its way to you!
• The PDF got an update yesterday; since I did not trigger it, it appears to be the result of a final round of copy editing and typo hunting. Don’t be concerned about missing new information in there: it’s just, er, cleaner.

As soon as the books make it to reseller shelves everywhere (most notably online resellers, I guess, such as Amazon and Barnes & Nobles), I’ll trigger a new round of releases. If you like the book, do spread the word! Blog about it, recommend it to your friends, rate it on Amazon… in short, yell back!

And as I may not post again before then…

Merry Chrismas to you all!

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.