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The core of Dart is surprisingly stable -- the team is doing a really solid job of not yanking the rug out from under developers' feet. Sure, I could have stopped at one blog post, but I ended up with 90 and still feel like I have more in me.
In the end, I was pleased with the result. But I might be biased :)
There is also a selfish aspect to it. By writing the best book that I am capable of, I learn this stuff much better than I would by playing around with it for a day or two.
Motivations and results feed each other and (hopefully) produce great results.
Neither The SPDY Book nor Dart for Hipsters was meant to be a definitive guide on their respective subjects. They are 150 page intros and, as you say, probably well suited for this approach.
For Recipes with Backbone, we aimed for the intermediate / advanced audience. Again, I agree that I probably could not have gotten there in 3 months on my own. For that, I relied heavily on my co-author (Nick Gauthier), who is battle tested with Backbone.js. So, again, I think we are in agreement.
That said, even the intro books are living books. I plan on refreshing and adding as the technology evolves and I as become battle tested (I'm working on edition 1.1 of The SPDY Book now). So over time, I hope to get closer to the ideal tome on the subjects.
I know Nick IRL. He had previously toyed with the idea of doing a book. I can't speak for him, but I think he signed up after seeing what I did with The SPDY Book. It worked out well IMO. He took the more in-depth ones, I took the more foundation recipes and then we proof read each other.
To be sure, I could know more. But I think you're being dismissive by characterizing this as superficial.
Have you already seen this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7328265/jquery-draggable-... ?
I plan to take a week or so in the very near future to again focus on improving the toolchain. Hopefully some, if not all, of your valid criticisms will get addressed.
We are targeting intermediate / advanced Backbone.js developers. That is, you should read this after you've read the tutorials and after your first Backbone app.
The recipes are real life lessons learned from a highly traffic'd Backbone site. These recipes comprise what we have learned as we made the leap to the next level of Backbone coding. We hope they will help others do the same.
There seems to have been a delay in Google Checkout itself earlier this evening. Some purchases took upwards of 60 seconds to go through.
Everything looks OK now, though. The most recent purchases were processed in less than 7 seconds.
Sorry for the hassle. No worries, though. We will make it right by our readers!