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Congrats to local tech guru Michael Nygard - his book Release It! has been named a Jolt Finalist. Way to go Mike! In case you haven’t noticed, Pragmatic Bookshelf has some awfully good titles…

I’m a huge fan of the No Fluff Just Stuff tour (yeah, I know - I could be seen as “biased”) and I’ve wholeheartedly recommended it to many, many people over the years. For those of you who have (inexplicably) ignored my advice, you can get a flavor of what a typical symposium is like by reading the latest and greatest No Fluff Just Stuff Anthology, Volume II. That’s right, for a low low price, you can have your very own copy of what will, I’m sure, be lauded as one of *the* great works of the 21st century (to point, the chapter on usability is top notch!) But don’t just take my word for it, see what Neal “let’s-see-how-many-books-I-can-write-in-one-year” Ford (otherwise known as the cat wrangler of the anthology) has to say here. You can order your very own copy from the Prags or Amazon (don’t forget, Anthologies make *great* gifts). Enjoy!

I want to extend a heartfelt congratulations to Venkat Subramaniam and Andy Hunt on Practices of an Agile Developer being named a 2007 Jolt Product Excellence Finalist! I was lucky enough to get an early look at PaD and I can’t recommend it enough. In case you missed it, Pragmatic Bookshelf has been on quite a run of late - Chad Fowler’s Rails Recipes was also named a finalist and this will mark the third year in a row that a Prag book as made the list (they’ve won two for the record). Anyway, a big W00T to Venkat, Andy, and Chad!!

Ryan and I were delighted to chat with the lads from ZeroLogik late last week and the results have been posted. As you might guess, we discussed Pro Ajax and Java Frameworks along with a plethora of current events. If you want a sense of how glamorous writing is, you’ll want to give this a listen Despite some technical glitches (our call dropped a couple of times) a good time was had by all! Thanks again to ZeroLogik for having us on and before you crank it up, please keep in mind they carry the explicit tag…

By now, it should be obvious that there are quite a few books out there on Ajax…and it seems like new one’s are published every day! In case you were curious, Michael Mahemoff (author of Ajax Design Patterns and proprietor of AjaxPatterns.org) has added a list of books to his popular site. Enjoy!

Ryan and I are proud to announce our second collaboration, Pro Ajax and Java Frameworks! We just got our author copies so I expect it will be available shortly from the major retailers. This book largely picks up where Foundations ends: after a general Ajax overview, we cover some common tools (including my new favorite Firebug) then we discuss a number of frameworks (Dojo, Prototype, script.aculo.us, DWR, etc). Once we’ve covered the client side goodness, we walk readers through integrating Ajax into common Java frameworks including Struts, JSF, Tapestry, and Spring.

We’ve been thrilled with how well received Foundations has been and we hope people learn as much from reading Pro Ajax as we did writing it!

Ryan and I had a rather interesting package waiting for us yesterday - a translated copy of Foundations of Ajax (I think Korean, but we’re not really sure). I dig the new cover and I’ve got to say, it’s pretty cool to see our book in a different language!

Here are a couple of pix:

There’s also a new review on Javalobby. I would like to say that at least a few of the examples run without a Servlet container and given this particular site’s audience, I’m betting people will be just fine. We certainly could have delved into patterns a bit more and I would direct people to Christian Gross’ Ajax Patterns and Best Practices and Michael Mahemoff’s Ajax Design Patterns (also check out his excellent Ajax Patterns web site).

All in all, a pretty positive review. As I’ve mentioned before, given more time, we would have written some examples in some other server side languages. I was happy to hear that the book has helped the reviewer (Schalk Neethling) and thanks for noticing the tools chapters - lots of people seem to miss those somehow!

By the way, that *was* Ryan on Future Tense a while back talking about Ajax…

Justin Gehtland recently posted some reviews of the first round of Ajax books; for his take on Foundations of Ajax click here (thanks to Brent Ashley for pointing these out to me - Justin must have switched his RSS feed recently because I had to modify my subscription in Bloglines). First off, I appreciate Justin’s kind words about me personally and as I think is obvious from my NF Quotes post and my summary of day 2 entry, the feeling is mutual! All in all, I like Justin’s take on the book and he’s one of the few that really got what we were trying to do - Ryan and I have always felt that the real strengths of FoA are the tools chapters. While IDEs are catching up, we’re largely on our own when it comes to coding JavaScript - which is why we spent a good chunk of the book writing about the developer’s toolbox.

As I mentioned in the comments, we would have covered the libraries in more depth than a short appendix but at the time we wrote the book (nearly a year ago now…wow, time really flies) it really wasn’t clear who the “winners” would be and while the space is still wide open, there is at least some consolidation around frameworks like Dojo, Prototype, and script.aculo.us. That said, we *will* be covering them (along with others) in our next book - Pro Ajax with Java (more of that soon!). If we ever write a second edition of FoA, we will certainly keep Justin’s remarks in mind.

Anyway, thanks for the review Justin and I really hope we’ll have some time to chat at RailsConf!

I meant to post this earlier (I’m a little behind on my blogging) but…Practices of an Agile Developer (Amazon link) is now availalbe! For my take on PaD, see my earlier post, take a look at Andy’s announcement (looking forward to those podcasts Andy!) as well as Venkat’s. This really is a fantastic book and I highly recommend it. Congratulations to Andy and Venkat for writing such a great book!

Ryan and I were quite thrilled to see that Foundations of Ajax was Slashdotted today - here’s a link. Craig Maloney gives us an 8 out of 10 (by the way, I loved your post on Michigan drivers…sad to say you could substitute Minnesota and it’d fit perfectly!) and there were some positive reviews within the comments as well. Needless to say, we’ve spiked a tad on Amazon… Tip of the cap to Brent Ashley for being the first to fill me in (hey, I was at lunch with the lads when it was posted) and thanks to those that emailed me - I appreciate the kind words! I’m just tickled that our little book made it to the front page on Joe’s customized Google home page